Jaguar XT5 computer

The world's fastest supercomputer is devoted to solving scientific questions that may save the planet -- climate change, renewable energy, new medicines -- rather than advances in nuclear weapons, at least for the moment.

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory's high-performance Jaguar XT5 computer, built by Seattle-based Cray Inc., was declared the fastest on the planet in the latest semiannual TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers, announced on Monday.

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After a $19.9 million upgrade funded with federal economic stimulus money, Jaguar posted a performance speed of 1.759 petaflops or quadrillions of calculations per second, making the National Science Foundation-funded, Cray-built supercomputer owned by the University of Tennessee and the National Institute for Computational Sciences the top "academic" supercomputer in the world.

This pushed the previous No. 1 supercomputer, Los Alamos National Laboratory's IBM Roadrunner system in New Mexico with a speed of 1.04 petaflops, to No. 2. Jaguar's computer stablemate at Oak Ridge, named Kraken, was ranked No. 3 with a speed of 831.7 teraflops or trillions of calculations per second.

The U.S. Department of Energy owns both Jaguar and Roadrunner, but uses them for different purposes. Jaguar is an "open science" tool for peer-reviewed research on a wide range of subjects. Roadrunner is devoted to the complex and classified evaluation of U.S. nuclear weapons.

"That tells you that science is really important, particularly for tackling some of the biggest challenges that we are facing today," said Thomas Zacharia, the Oak Ridge Lab's deputy director for science and technology.

"When you make these big trillion-dollar bets on energy, it needs to be informed by the best climate science," he said. "This machine is at the intersection of better climate change science and energy technology policy."

The questions scientists are hoping to solve with these machines run the gamut from the origins of the universe to the science of soap bubbles.

Resource: http://news.discovery.com/tech/new-worlds-fastest-supercomputer-named.html