Oak Ridge National Laboratory's "Jaguar" Upgraded to Over 260 Teraflops
SEATTLE, WA, May 15, 2008 (MARKET WIRE via COMTEX News Network) -- Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) today announced that Oak Ridge National Laboratory has completed acceptance of an upgrade to its Cray XT4(TM) system, taking the highly scalable supercomputer from 119 teraflops (one trillion floating point operations per second) to more than 260 teraflops. Already one of the world's largest high-performance computing (HPC) systems, the supercomputer, codenamed "Jaguar," was upgraded to incorporate new Quad-Core AMD Opteron(TM) processors, more than doubling the system's compute performance.
"Compute performance has a direct impact on our ability to tackle the greatest engineering and scientific challenges we face, resulting in the breakthroughs that change society," said Dr. Thomas Zacharia, Oak Ridge National Laboratory associate director for computing and computational sciences. "The scalability, reliability and upgradeability of the Cray XT4 has made Jaguar an increasingly powerful computing resource for our researchers and scientists. This upgrade will enable even greater achievements in today's most important areas of science."
All of the Cray XT4 system's dual-core compute sockets were upgraded to Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors and the memory in each socket was doubled.
"This is an important milestone for leadership computing," said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. "Researchers were already achieving breakthrough science with the Cray XT4 system, but doubling its performance will help enable users to solve even more complex problems -- faster. Simulations will run with increased accuracy, helping to advance science in the critical areas of climate change prediction and mitigation, the development of alternative fuels and energy sources, and the study of the origin of stars, galaxies and planetary systems. Designed for high scalability and upgradeability, the Cray XT system at Oak Ridge has now been expanded to a full 10 times its original size, starting out as a 25-teraflops supercomputer with upgrades to 50, 119 and now over 260 teraflops. It is a great example how the thoughtful engineering that we build into Cray systems up front can dramatically extend the life of a system and reduce the cost of ownership for our customers."
About Quad-Core AMD Opteron Processor
More than just four cores, Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors feature Direct Connect Architecture, which means processors are directly connected to one another, and the I/O and memory subsystem are also directly connected to the processor, helping reduce bottlenecks for better performance. Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors are not only the industry's first native quad-core processors, they are also the first native quad-core processors designed to operate within the same socket and thermal envelopes as AMD's current generation of dual-core processors.
About the Cray XT4 Supercomputer
The Cray XT4 is a massively parallel processor (MPP) supercomputer purpose-built to deliver exceptional sustained application performance for challenging scientific and engineering problems. The supercomputer's high-speed 3D torus interconnect, advanced MPP operating system and high-speed global input/output make it possible for users to scale applications to more than 120,000 processor cores with exceptional sustained performance. The system's scalable processing element uses x86 64-bit AMD Opteron processors that employ HyperTransport(TM) technology to increase bandwidth and reduce latency. Go to
www.cray.com/products/xt4/index.html for more information.
About Cray Inc.
As a global leader in supercomputing, Cray provides highly advanced supercomputers and world-class services and support to government, industry and academia. Cray technology enables scientists and engineers to achieve remarkable breakthroughs by accelerating performance, improving efficiency and extending the capabilities of their most demanding applications. Cray's Adaptive Supercomputing vision will result in innovative next-generation products that integrate diverse processing technologies into a unified architecture, allowing customers to surpass today's limitations and meeting the market's continued demand for realized performance. Go to
www.cray.com for more information.
Cray is a registered trademark, and Cray XT4 is a trademark of Cray Inc. HyperTransport is a licensed trademark of the HyperTransport Technology Consortium. AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, AMD Opteron and combinations thereof, are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Other names are for informational purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners.
