The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in the USA announced that its new Cray super computer “Jaguar” reached a computing power of 1.3 Petaflops. This should beat even the fastest super computer in the world, the “roadrunner” with around 1.026 Petaflops. The release of the 32nd Top500 list in one week should bring certainty.
Jaguar will be the first super computer on the top of the list not manufactured by IBM in the last few years. It uses a very unusual system to reach this computing power: Using a hybrid system which combines normal Opteron processors connected via InfiniBand and additional PowerXCell-8i-Processors, the computer can increase the speed of applications significantly.
The benchmark used by the Top500 list is called LinPack, a quite old benchmark test originally designed for super computers in the 1970s and 1980s. It’s not optimized for the structure of today’s super computers, so the results may not be as good as with modern tests.
If you are interested in running such a test on your computer, you could use LAPACK, the more modern version of LinPack:
- Compile guide for Windows XP
- Precompiled LAPACK binaries
- Windows Installer with GUI and all libraries included
