The Cray Jaguar supercomputer. Credit: NCCS.GOV

If only the average desktop PC upgrade were this effective. Seattle-based supercomputer maker Cray Inc. announced this morning that an overhaul of a Cray XT5, dubbed Jaguar, has put the machine in the No. 1 slot on the latest list of the world's Top 500 fastest supercomputers.

Jaguar, which is installed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, knocked an IBM supercomputer called Roadrunner out of the top slot. Jaguar was upgraded this fall to give it a total of more than 224,000 processing cores (Six-Core AMD Opteron). Its peak speed of 2.3 petaflops translates into more than two-thousand trillion calculations per second.

See this profile of Jaguar at the National Center for Computational Sciences for more information.

Said Cray CEO and president Peter Ungaro, in a news release: "While we are thrilled to have designed and built a supercomputing system that has broken a number of firsts in the industry, we are most proud of the fact that Jaguar is used day-in and day-out to solve real-world scientific problems at sustained speeds that no other system in the world can match -- including the first two scientific applications in the world ever to break one petaflops in sustained performance."