U.S Jaguar supercomputer upgraded

Oak Ridge, Tenn -- The U.S. Department of Energy says upgrades to its Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Jaguar supercomputer have more than doubled its performance.

Government scientists said the system recently completed various tests, running applications in climate science, quantum chemistry, combustion science, materials science, nanoscience, fusion science and astrophysics, as well as benchmarking applications that test supercomputing performance.

The Jaguar system, a Cray XT4, now uses more than 31,000 processing cores to deliver up to 263 trillion calculations a second, or 263 teraflops.

"The Department of Energy's Leadership Computing Facility is putting unprecedented computing power in the hands of leading scientists to enable the next breakthroughs in science and technology," said laboratory Director Thom Mason. "This upgrade is an essential step along that path, bringing us ever closer to the era of petascale computing."

Petascale computers are capable of thousands of trillions of calculations per second.

Copyright 2008 by United Press International.