| Name | flops |
|---|---|
| megaflop | 106 |
| gigaflop | 109 |
| teraflop | 1012 |
| petaflop | 1015 |
| exaflop | 1018 |
| zettaflop | 1021 |
| yottaflop | 1024 |
Recent expansion has doubled performance of the Jaguar computer at ORNL to 119 teraflops of peak performance (119 trillion mathematical calculations per second). It is now the most powerful open scientific computing system in the world.
Doubling the size of the system involved adding involving 124 cabinets. Jaguar uses over 45,000 of the latest quad-core Opteron processors from AMD and features 362 terabytes of memory and a 10-petabyte file system. The system has a rating of 119 teraflops of peak performance (a teraflop is 1012).
When I worked at Cray, the metric was simple multiples of sustained gigaflops. A gigaflop is one billion (109) floating-point operations per second.
The upgraded Jaguar will undergo rigorous acceptance testing through December before transitioning to production in early 2009.
(See also: ORNL: Cray supercomputer doubles performance)
(See also: DOE’s ORNL supercomputer now world’s fastest for open science)