Record Amount of Supercomputer Time Means New Science | Wired Science

In 2009, 900 million processor hours were up for grabs (a million processing hours would take 1,000 processors 1,000 hours, or around 41 days), but both computers received huge performance boosts this year. Jaguar’s processor count has shot up from 31,328 to 180,832, while Intrepid now boasts 163,840 from 32,768. Jaguar’s peak performance is now a blistering 1.64 petaflops (a quadrillion and a half floating point operations per second), making it the second most powerful supercomputer on Earth.

The only number cruncher with more power is IBM’s “Roadrunner” at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which runs simulations of nuclear weapons, and sits behind the rather impenetrable firewall of national security.

The boost will allow scientists to tackle traditionally cantankerous problems that involve multiple simultaneous physical phenomena. In enormous, high-resolution simulations, they can tweak an unprecedented multitude of conditions to test their theories.

Record Amount of Supercomputer Time Means New Science | Wired Science

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