Cray is no stranger to the supercomputing world — it’s practically the pioneer in the field. This week, the department of energy (DOE) announced that it has completed the setup of a new Cray XT Jaguar supercomputer that breaks all world records, claiming to be the fastest supercomputer on Earth.
The monstrous machine is made up of 45,000 quad-core AMD Opteron processors. As a frame of reference, that’s a mind boggling 180,000 cores. And here I am getting excited over my dual quad-core machine. In terms of memory, the XT Jaguar is outfitted with 362 terabytes (TB) of memory or 362,000 gigabytes of memory; enough to load just about anything.
Storage is handled by traditional hard drives instead of SSDs, but don’t boo. The XT Jaguar has 10 petabytes of storage. What’s 10 petabytes?—ten million gigabytes. At this point, people would usually say that that’s more than enough for anything, but even savvy computer users these days can figure out ways to utilize that kind of capacity.
The XT Jaguar has so much bandwidth and so much computing power that it can process a quadrillion mathematical calculations per second. Sustained memory bandwidth tops out at 578 terabytes per second and I/O bandwidth squeezes in 284 gigabytes per second.
