This past Monday, the insanely powerful Jaguar XT5 supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee was named the fastest supercomputer in the world. With a speed of 1.759 petaflops (quadrillions of calculations per second), this incredibly swift machine is currently being used by the forces of good to solve the world’s problems – including one that is very near and dear to our hearts, climate change.
Over a billion hours of processing time on the computer have already been booked for 2010 by research institutes like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Argonne National Laboratory. NOAA for instance will be using its supercomputing time to develop high-resolution models to predict climate change on a regional scale. University of Tennessee and ORNL will be studying enzymes in plant cell walls to develop a better ethanol. And Argonne will be developing new algorithms for fast reactors that would produce smaller amounts of nuclear waste.
A $19.9 million upgrade funded with federal economic stimulus money was what allowed the new supercomputer to beat out the almost as fast IBM Roadrunner. Unlike the Roadrunner, which is used solely for studies related to nuclear weapons, Jaguar is an open tool meant to be used by various research institutes to study and solve more global issues – namely energy, climate change, enzyme studies for better fuels, medicine, nuclear security, and even exploring the origins of the universe. Maybe it’ll even be able to locate the Higgs boson!
Thomas Zacharia, the Oak Ridge Lab’s deputy director for science and technology, says about the computer, “When you make these big trillion-dollar bets on energy, it needs to be informed by the best climate science. This machine is at the intersection of better climate change science and energy technology policy.”
+ National Center for Computational Science, home of the Jaguar
get the free Inhabitat newsletter
more popular stories >
more popular stories >
more popular stories >
[...] seems there’s a new supercomputer every month, but now there’s a new standard for differentiating them – by how green [...]
Can it run Crysis?
I wonder how much energy it uses? I hope it’s at least green energy or that they offset the emission
And it is no more accurate than the chicken bones, tealeaves and runestones that it supersedes.
Climate chage scientist is the new name for an ancient profession… soothsayer. So does this powerful machine help with changing the rules of peer review to help climate scientists bully any naysayers out of scientific journals? At least then this expencive machine would have a real use… a corrupt and disgusting use, but still a use.
Whoah! Very nice creation. This powerful Jaguar XT5 supercomputer is truly insane! Bet I’m gonna blog this immediately, lol. I am definitely interested to put it at the Blazintech (http://www.blazintech.net/) blog.
I bet it works out the way to resolve climate change is to remove all humans
That’s a really cool idea- I’d love to hear about the other problems and projects that this machine is chugging on. Does it work on multiple problems at once?