Jaguar Passes Roadrunner in Top500 (Gallery)
The Petaflop pioneer Roadrunner has been relegated to second place after the 225,000 processor cores of the Jaguar XT5. Europe's largest supercomputer, Bluegene/P, has meanwhile slipped in the ranks.
The current world champion of supercomputers, the Jaguar XT5, which since end of October underwent a processor upgrade from four-core to six-core CPUs, at 2.3 Petaflops/s, has trumped second place Roadrunner by nearly 100%. Petaflops/s refers to quadrillion calculations per second.
The Jaguar is a Cray XT5 system with 37,376 six-core Opterons, nearly 300 TeraBytes of RAM and 10,000 TeraBytes of hard drives. The researchers at the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) use the Jaguar at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) for simulation and computations for environmental, chemical and material science, nuclear energy, astrophysics and particle physics (see Gallery). All the Jaguar computer nodes somewhere run SUSE Linux, whose kernel Cray reduced to essential services to avoid interrupting any scientific applications.
The National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) at the University of Tennessee, the NCCS partner, took third place with its Kraken supercomputer, with 832 Teraflops/s, 100,000 processor cores and 130 TeraBytes of RAM. The machine is again from Cray, and another XT5 model, to be specific. Bluegen/P from the Juelich research center in Germany this time had to be satisfied with fourth place: with 825 Teraflops/s it meant stepping down from third place it still had in June 2009.
Nearly 90% (446 machines) from the Top500 systems run on Linux, among them SUSE, Red Hat and CentOS. Second place went to UNIX at 5% (25 machines), third to Windows with 1% (5 machines). Although the research runs over the fastest supercomputers, together with the academic realm it amounts to only 35% of the worldwide giants with more than 20 Teraflops/s. Industrial investors are banking on High Computing in that it blocks off almost 63% of all supercomputers. About 55% are deployed in the U.S., with England a distant second at 10% and Germany at 5.4%. HP took over the lead from IBM as manufacturer, even though IBM is still assembling the most powerful computers worldwide.
Gallery (8 images) |
---|
![]() ![]() ![]() |
Comments
comments powered by DisqusSubscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you've found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
elementary OS 7.1 is Now Available for Download
The team behind elementary OS has released the latest version of its operating system with a focus on personalization, inclusivity, accessibility, and privacy.
-
The GNU Project Celebrates Its 40th Birthday
September 27 marks the 40th anniversary of the GNU Project, and it was celebrated with a hacker meeting in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland.
-
Linux Kernel Reducing Long-Term Support
LTS support for the Linux kernel is about to undergo some serious changes that will have a considerable impact on the future.
-
Fedora 39 Beta Now Available for Testing
For fans and users of Fedora Linux, the first beta of release 39 is now available, which is a minor upgrade but does include GNOME 45.
-
Fedora Linux 40 to Drop X11 for KDE Plasma
When Fedora 40 arrives in 2024, there will be a few big changes coming, especially for the KDE Plasma option.
-
Real-Time Ubuntu Available in AWS Marketplace
Anyone looking for a Linux distribution for real-time processing could do a whole lot worse than Real-Time Ubuntu.
-
KSMBD Finally Reaches a Stable State
For those who've been looking forward to the first release of KSMBD, after two years it's no longer considered experimental.
-
Nitrux 3.0.0 Has Been Released
The latest version of Nitrux brings plenty of innovation and fresh apps to the table.
-
Linux From Scratch 12.0 Now Available
If you're looking to roll your own Linux distribution, the latest version of Linux From Scratch is now available with plenty of updates.
-
Linux Kernel 6.5 Has Been Released
The newest Linux kernel, version 6.5, now includes initial support for two very exciting features.
Flops = Floating-point operations per second
1.0 Petaflops means 1.0 x 10^15 floating-point operations PER SECOND.
Don'f forget Debian ;)