Jaguar (supercomputer)
| Company type | Supercomputer |
|---|---|
| Industry | High-performance computing |
| Predecessor | Cray XT3 |
| Founded | 2005 |
| Successor | Titan (Cray XK7) |
| Headquarters | Oak Ridge, Tennessee , United States |
| Products | Cray XT4, Cray XT5 supercomputing system |
| Owner | Oak Ridge National Laboratory |
Jaguar, also referred to as OLCF-2, was a petascale supercomputing system developed by Cray and housed at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility within Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee. This highly parallel machine achieved a peak computational capacity exceeding 1,750 teraFLOPS (1.75 petaFLOPS), utilizing 224,256 AMD Opteron processor cores based on the x86 architecture, and operated on the Cray Linux Environment. Jaguar represented a Cray XT5 platform, building upon the earlier Cray XT4 design.
In November 2009 and again in June 2010, Jaguar held the top position on the TOP500 list as the fastest supercomputer worldwide. However, by October 2010, China’s Tianhe-1A system outperformed Jaguar with a capability exceeding 2.5 quadrillion calculations per second, relegating Jaguar to second place in the subsequent November 2010 TOP500 ranking.
The year 2012 saw Jaguar's transformation into the hybrid Cray XK7 system dubbed Titan, which incorporated the Gemini interconnect network and integrated Nvidia Kepler-generation GPUs into all compute nodes. This upgrade substantially boosted both its performance and energy efficiency.
Development
Since its initial launch in 2005 as a Cray XT3 system delivering 25 teraFLOPS, Jaguar underwent several significant enhancements. By early 2008, it had been upgraded to a Cray XT4 configuration capable of 263 teraFLOPS, followed later that year by expansion into a Cray XT5 platform reaching 1.4 petaFLOPS. In 2009, after replacing its original 2.3 GHz quad-core processors with faster 2.6 GHz six-core AMD Istanbul CPUs, Jaguar featured over 200,000 cores interconnected through Cray’s Seastar2+ network. The system’s XT4 and XT5 segments were connected via an InfiniBand network linked to the Spider file system.
The XT5 portion of Jaguar contained 18,688 compute nodes, each equipped with two six-core AMD Opteron 2435 (Istanbul) processors and 16 GiB of memory. Meanwhile, the XT4 segment consisted of 7,832 nodes featuring quad-core AMD Opteron 1354 (Budapest) processors paired with 8 GiB memory per node. Altogether, the system’s aggregate memory capacity exceeded 360 terabytes.
For storage, Jaguar utilized the Spider Lustre file system, which provided a combined read/write throughput of approximately 240 GB/s alongside more than 10 petabytes of total storage space.
A wide range of software applications have been optimized for deployment on the Cray XT series platforms, many demonstrating efficient scalability across between 20,000 and 150,000 processor cores.
Jaguar was primarily dedicated to addressing intricate scientific problems such as climate simulation, renewable energy research, materials science investigations, seismology studies, chemical modeling, astrophysics research, nuclear fusion experiments, and combustion analysis. Roughly 80 percent of its computational resources were distributed annually through the Department of Energy’s INCITE program—a competitive allocation process accessible to academic institutions, industry partners, government entities, and nonprofit organizations.