SEATTLE, 13 April 2007.Cray Inc. has completed work with the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) whereby the capacity of its Cray supercomputer was doubled. The ORNL system, already the most powerful supercomputer for open scientific research at 54 teraflops (trillion floating point operations per second), now has performance capacity of 119 teraflops.
The upgrade is an important milestone in ORNL's plan to provide its users with a petaflops-speed supercomputer (1,000 trillion floating point operations per second) in 2008.
Scientists and industry partners such as Boeing, Corning, DreamWorks Animation, and General Atomics will be able to employ the enhanced Cray supercomputer configuration to conduct high-impact projects as part of the Department of Energy's INCITE program. In addition, ORNL staff and guest researchers will use the Cray supercomputer to advance the frontiers of neutron science, biological systems, energy production, and advanced materials.
ORNL enhanced its existing Cray XT3 supercomputer and integrated it with a compatible Cray XT4 system. The merged supercomputer has a total of 11,708 dual-core AMD Opteron processors, along with 46 terabytes of memory and 750 terabytes of disk storage. The Cray XT4 supercomputer can be upgraded to AMD's quad-core processing technology in the future.
The system is housed in ORNL's National Leadership Computing Facility, which is part of the DOE Office of Science's 20-year plan to provide facilities needed to extend the frontiers of science, to pursue opportunities of enormous importance and to maintain U.S. science primacy in the world. The supercomputer at ORNL will be open to the scientific community for research.
