What Can You Do with 11,000 Multi-Core Processors?

"Petaflops" sounds like a name you'd give a puppy. In fact, petaflops are a thousand trillion floating-point operations per second. Sorry, I don't even know how to express that numerically.

But for me, what's more interesting than a string of zeros that stretch from here to the back forty is how you generate a petaflop. For the answer to this condundrum, look no further than the folks at the Oak Ridge National Lab which recently doubled the performance of its "Jaguar"computer to119 teraflops of peak performance (119 trillion mathematical calculations per second), making it, ORNL claims, the most powerful open scientific computing system in the world.

At the core (no pun intended) of the system are (get this) 11,708 dual-core AMD Opteron processors, 46 terabytes of memory, and 750 terabytes of disk storage. Moreover, by late 2007 as dual-core processors will be replaced with AMD quad-core processors. The memory will be doubled and the operating system will migrate to a version of Linux on the computer nodes.

In what I would categorize as an understatement, project director Buddy Bland said "We are excited about the performance." He went on to say that "AORSA, a major fusion code, achieved sustained performance of 38 teraflops on the first ever run on the system, which is the fastest ever for this application. We expect the code to achieve in excess of 60 teraflops sustained performance."

Posted by Jon Erickson at 08:30 AM  Permalink