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The new era of computing will see machines perform at least 1,000 times faster than today’s most powerful supercomputers.
By 2020, exaFLOP computers will go online.
The United States, China, Japan, the European Union, and Russia are all investing millions of dollars in supercomputer research. In February, the EU announced it was doubling investment in research to €1.2 billion ($1.6 billion).
What is an exaFLOP?
Computer scientists measure a supercomputer’s performance in FLOPS, an acronym for Floating Point Operations per Second, while “exa” is a metric prefix that stands for quintillion (or a billion billion). An exascale computer could perform approximately as many operations per second as 50 million laptops.
How fast are today’s supercomputers?
Today, the fastest supercomputers operate at the petaFLOP level, performing more than one quadrillion (or a million billion) operations per second.
The first computer to break through the petaFLOP barrier was IBM’s Roadrunner in 2008. But its reign as the fastest computer in the world didn’t last long, with the Cray Jaguar installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the United States becoming the quickest with a performance of 1.75 petaFLOPS in 2009.
The machine, installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science, in Kobe, Japan, currently operates at over 10 petaFLOPS. It is more than four times faster than its nearest rival, China’s NUDT YH MPP computer (2.57 petaflops).
What is in them?
The space you need is similar to that of a football field.
The K computer contains a mind-boggling 88,128 computer processors and is made up of 864 refrigerator-sized cabinets.
Here are some key features and historical points about the Cray Jaguar:
- Performance: At its peak, Jaguar was capable of performing at a speed of up to 2.3 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point operations per second). This high level of performance made it one of the top supercomputers in the world according to the TOP500 list, which ranks supercomputers based on their performance on the Linpack benchmark.
- Architecture: The Jaguar system was based on Cray’s XT5 platform. It utilized AMD Opteron processors, which were known for their high performance and energy efficiency. The supercomputer was a massively parallel system with tens of thousands of compute nodes interconnected by Cray’s high-speed SeaStar interconnect.
- Purpose and Applications: Jaguar was used for a wide variety of scientific research that required massive computational power. It played a significant role in advancing knowledge in fields such as climate science, where it was used to run detailed simulations of Earth’s climate system; in physics, where it contributed to research in nuclear fusion and quantum chromodynamics; and in biology, where it aided in the understanding of molecular dynamics and genomic sequences.
- Energy Efficiency: Despite its high performance, Jaguar was also noted for its energy efficiency. Supercomputers consume a significant amount of electricity, and efforts are continually made to improve their energy efficiency. The Jaguar system was designed to maximize computational power while minimizing energy consumption, a key consideration in the design of high-performance computing systems.
- Evolution to Titan: The Jaguar supercomputer underwent several upgrades during its lifetime to enhance its performance. It was eventually upgraded to the Titan supercomputer, which further increased its computational capabilities. Titan incorporated NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators alongside traditional CPUs, adopting a hybrid architecture that significantly boosted its performance per watt, allowing it to achieve even greater computational speeds and efficiency.
The Cray Jaguar supercomputer was a milestone in the evolution of high-performance computing, demonstrating the capabilities of modern supercomputers to solve complex scientific problems and contributing to significant advancements in various fields of research.