GOVERNMENT

Upgraded System Enables Faster Forecasts Over Greater Areas: Cray Inc. today announced that a recently upgraded Cray XT4 supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has set a new performance record for the Weather and Research Forecast (WRF) meteorological modeling software. ORNL's Cray XT4 system, nicknamed "Jaguar," ran the advanced WRF code on a total of 12,500 processors, achieving sustained performance that reached an unprecedented 7.1 teraflops (trillion floating point operations per second). At this level of performance, scientists can generate a one-day, 2.5-kilometer-resolution weather forecast covering the entire continental United States in as little as 18 minutes, compared to the several hours it would take on a less efficient system. "The expanded Cray XT4 Jaguar supercomputer provides a world-class platform for high-impact scientific research," said John Drake, ORNL's chief computational climate scientist. "The system offers exceptional performance that allows researchers at ORNL to tackle some of the most formidable challenges in climate modeling, materials science, fusion energy and other important scientific studies." The Jaguar system at ORNL is the largest supercomputer in the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science, and is the major computing resource for DOE's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment, or INCITE, program. ORNL increased the system's computing power to 54 teraflops in mid-2006, making it one of the most powerful open scientific systems in the world. "The Cray XT infrastructure is designed for upgradeability, so customers can dramatically increase the number and speed of compute operations without having to purchase a new system or change their software configurations," said Per Nyberg, Cray's Earth Sciences Segment director. "The Jaguar system at ORNL demonstrates how this scalable architecture can be leveraged to provide unprecedented levels of sustained performance for key scientific applications such as WRF. Increasing our ability to predict and prepare for extreme weather events is sure to yield important benefits for society and the world economy."