An upgrade to a Cray XT5 high-performance computing system deployed by the Department of Energy has made the "Jaguar" supercomputer the world's fastest.

Located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Jaguar is the scientific research community's most powerful computational tool for exploring solutions to some of today's most difficult problems.

"Supercomputer modeling and simulation is changing the face of science and sharpening America's competitive edge," said Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. "Oak Ridge and other DOE national laboratories are helping address major energy and climate challenges and lead America toward a clean energy future."

To net the number-one spot on the TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers, Jaguar's Cray XT5 component was upgraded this fall from four-core to six-core processors and ran a benchmark program called High-Performance Linpack (HPL) at a speed of 1.759 petaflop/s (quadrillion floating point operations, or calculations, per second). The rankings were announced today in Portland at SC09, an international supercomputing conference.

In 2004, DOE's Office of Science set out to create a user facility that would provide scientists with world-leading computational research tools. One result was the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, which supports national science priorities through the deployment and operation of the most advanced supercomputers available to the scientific community.

"Our computational center works closely with the science teams to effectively use a computer system of this size and capability," said James Hack, director of the National Center for Computational Sciences that houses Jaguar in the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility.

"Jaguar is now the world's fastest supercomputer, as well as the scientific research community's most powerful computational tool for exploring solutions to difficult problems, such as climate change and the development of new energy technologies. (Credit: Image courtesy of Oak Ridge National Laboratory)"

Source: Oak Ridge National Laboratory