Oak Ridge has been given the task of creating a supercomputer cluster in the next five years that is capable of 250 teraflops of peak performance and 50 teraflops of sustained performance. Eventually, the lab will house one petaflops – that’s 1,000 teraflops – of aggregate computing capacity under the budget approved by the DoE.
Rather than pick any one architecture, Oak Ridge is going to rely on a mix of architectures to create this behemoth, which will complicate the task of deciding whether the cluster is the most powerful supercomputer in the world. That said, the deal is a big win for rebounding vector supercomputer maker Cray Inc.
Oak Ridge will be expanding its Cray X1 parallel vector super to 20 teraflops this year and will add a 20 teraflops Red Storm Opteron-Linux supercluster in 2005. The Argonne National Laboratory, which is networked to Oak Ridge, will be installing a five teraflops Blue Gene/L Linux supercomputer (IBM’s third commercial Blue Gene sale).
In 2006, Oak Ridge will add a 100 teraflops Cray X2, the kicker to the X1, which will be upgraded to a 250 teraflos machine by 2007. Silicon Graphics Inc apparently has been awarded some DoE contracts for the Oak Ridge upgrade, but the details were not available at press time.
The massively parallel vector supercomputer known as Earth Simulator, built by NEC Corp for the Japanese government, is the current top-end supercomputer in the world, with 40.9 teraflops of peak performance and an impressive 35.9 teraflops of sustained performance.
The 252 processor Cray X1 at Oak Ridge is rated at a mere 2.9 teraflops of sustained performance and 3.2 teraflops of peak performance. Both the NEC and the Cray designs, unlike many clusters, use vector processors and are very efficient at what they do. On many Unix and Linux superclusters, 60% of the aggregate computing capacity goes up the chimney.
