U.S. DOE now computes faster than anyone with Jaguar

William Atkins
Tuesday, 11 November 2008 23:35

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DOE scientists have already proudly reported that a calculation in the field of superconductivity has already shown that the supercomputer can sustain speeds of over 1.3 petaflops.

FLOPS (or flops) is an acronym for Floating point Operations Per Second. It is a basic measurement of a computer’s performance, especially with regards to scientific research and subsequent calculations.

A supercomputer with 1 petaflops is able to perform one thousand trillion (or, quadrillion) floating point operations per second. Therefore, the Jaguar is able to perform up to 1.64 thousand trillion FLOPS.

Dr. Raymond L. Orbach, who is the under secretary for Science at the DOE, stated, “Jaguar is one of science’s newest and most formidable tools for advancement in science and engineering. It will enable researchers to simulate physical processes on a scale never seen before, and approach convergence for dynamical processes never thought possible."[DOE]

He adds, "High end computation will become the critical third pillar for scientific discovery, along with experiment and theory.” [DOE]

As the title of the InformationWeek.com article states, the “Cray XT Jaguar Supercomputer surpasses IBM Roadrunner,” which has a top speed of 1.026 petaflops.

Page three concludes the story.