Stories about: Oak Ridge National Laboratory

About five months after IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer became the fastest computer in the world, Cray Inc.'s XT Jaguar could dethrone it next week.

Welcome to the petaflop generation. That was the message as the new most powerful supercomputer in the world IBM's $100,000 million Roadrunner system installed at the US Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory was officially named the most powerful and energy efficient supercomputer in the world.

Proving that size isn't everything, the Top500 List of supercomputers for the first time is looking at power efficiency.

Now that IBM has broken supercomputing's petaflop barrier with its RoadRunner system, capable of more than one thousand trillion (one quadrillion) sustained floating-point operations per second, attention among supercomputer developers turns next to a new performance goal: an exascale system.

To try to assess global warming's impact on the environment and see if the world faces an abrupt climate change, Zhengyu Liu, director of the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, is turning to supercomputing technology.

Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory made a big leap in their research into all things small.

In yet another example showing that clueless consumers aren't the only ones who fall victim to computer scams, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory yesterday disclosed that phishing attacks may have provided cybercrooks with access to personal data on people who visited the lab between 1990 and 2004.

The US science and technology lab Oak Ridge National Laboratory Thursday disclosed it has been compromised by what it described as a "sophisticated cyber attack that appears to be part of a coordinated attempt to gain access to computer networks at numerous laboratories and other institutions across the country."

A team led by Indiana University won this year's Supercomputing Bandwidth Challenge by achieving a peak transfer rate of over 18Gbps out of a possible maximum of 20Gbps.

In 2003, the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) installed a US$25 million supercomputing system with about 2,000 of Intel's Itanium 2 processors. At the time, the machine was recognized as the world's fifth most powerful computer.

For years, the name of the game in supercomputing has been raw speed, with hardware and software designers striving to boost the number of instructions per second -- FLOPS -- that could be crunched. Gigaflops computers gave way to teraflops machines, which are now yielding to petaflops models -- those able to execute 1 quadrillion computations per second.