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Oak Ridge: The Road to Exascale Computing

We continue our look at the supercomputing technology and infrastructure housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which houses three of the world's most powerful supercomputers. That includes the Jaguar system, which is in the process of being upgraded to Titan and will be capable of a peak performance of up to 20 petaflops - or 20 million billion calculations per second.But Titan is just a first step toward the goal of creating an exascale supercomputer—one able to deliver 1 million trillion calculations each second - by 2018. Here's a look inside the Oak Ridge data center:

The cooling system for the Kraken XT5 supercomputer features Cray's ECOPhlex system, which combines upper cooling loops filled with refrigerant (the silver piping) with a chilled water loop inside the cabinet, which houses an enhanced version of the Liebert XDP pumping unit. (Photo: Rich Miller)

The Jaguar supercomputer, a 2.37 petaflop machine, is in the process of being upgraded to 20 petaflops. Oak Ridge is using cold aisle containment to improve the efficiency of the Jaguar cabinets. (Photo: Rich Miller)

Some of the disk storage cabinets from Data Direct Networks. The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility also has a large tape storage library for long-tem backup. (Photo: Rich Miller)

This view of the storage area provides a better view of the cold aisle containment system for these cabinets, which use raised-floor air cooling instead of the liquid cooling systems used for the facility's supercomputers. (Photo: Rich Miller)

See Part One: Inside the Oak Ridge Supercomputing Facility