Twice a year, the world’s top 500 supercomputers are announced. The most recent winner is the Jaguar which pretty much wiped the floor with the competition, managing a performance benchmark 69% above the IBM Roadrunner which came in second.

Let’s take a closer look at the Jaguar, the fastest supercomputer in the world today.

Quick data about the Jaguar

* Performance: 1.759 petaflops (theoretical maximum: 2.33 petaflops)
* Processors: 37,376 six-core AMD Opteron 2.6 GHz
* Processor cores: 224,256
* Total RAM: 300 terabyte
* Total disc space: 10 petabyte
* System type: Cray XT5
* Operating system: Cray custom version of SUSE Linux

One petaflops is the equivalent of one thousand trillion operations per second, which means the Jaguar is capable of a theoretical maximum performance of 2,330,000,000,000,000 operations per second.

The computing power of the Jaguar is used by scientists to run simulations of climate changes and effects, supernovas, and a number of other compute-intensive applications.

The Jaguar Cray XT5 setup takes up 4,400 square feet (409 square meters), which is larger than an NBA basketball court.

Source: here