News
Publication: The Oak Ridger ; Date: Aug 15, 2007
ORNL, UT selected for second supercomputer
By Duncan Mansfield | Associated Press
KNOXVILLE — The Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee took another quantum leap in the computing universe Wednesday with a decision by the National Science Board to underwrite a second world-class supercomputer in Tennessee.
The board authorized the National Science Foundation to award $65 million over five years to build a supercomputer capable of nearly 1,000 teraflops — or 1,000 trillion calculations a second — at UT’s Joint Institute for Computational Science.
The institute is located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a Department of Energy facility managed by UT and Battelle Memorial Institute.
The announcement means that the Oak Ridge lab, which currently hosts the second-fastest supercomputer in the world, could have the world’s two fastest machines by 2009.
“This is another tremendous win for UT and for the partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory,” said U.S. Rep. Zach Wamp, R-3rd District. “Our state is rapidly becoming the world’s center for high-performance computing.”
For scientists studying global climate change, the design of new materials and the reactions occurring in living cells, the new supercomputing goal is 1 petaflop — or 1,000 trillion arithmetic calculations per second.
That would be three times faster than the world’s current fastest supercomputer — the 280-teraflop, restricted-access IBM BlueGene/L at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
It would be faster still than the world’s No. 2 machine — the open-research, 101.7-teraflop Cray XT3/XT4 supercomputer known as “Jaguar” already operating at the Oak Ridge lab.
However, Oak Ridge’s Jaguar is on a track for upgrades that will take it to the 1 petaflop level by 2009, when the second supercomputer announced Wednesday is slated to power up.
The National Science Board on Wednesday recommended an even larger award of $208 million over four and a half years to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for an even faster petascale supercomputer. But that computer isn’t set to go online until 2011.
UT officials said they couldn’t comment on the award until a final agreement is negotiated with the National Science Foundation.
The UT proposal was led by Thomas Zacharia, who heads the supercomputer program in Oak Ridge, and includes two partners, the Texas Advanced Computing Center and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.