Step aside, Virginia Tech, there’s a new top dog in the Virginia supercomputing space: the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. The “Jefferson Lab,” as it’s known for short, has issued a press release boasting that it now lays claim to the fastest supercomputer in Virginia — and the 95th fastest in the world. Several years ago, Virginia Tech had won brief acclaim as home to the fastest supercomputer in the world. The honorific evidently doesn’t last very long, as universities and research institutions leapfrog each other with great regularity.
The Jefferson Lab, located in Newport News, qualified for TOP500 list by running the “Linpack Benchmark,” a calculation used as a yardstick for supercomputer performance. The cluster clocked out at 13,460 Gigaflops.
The Jefferson Lab, which is built around a particle collider, uses the machine to run computer simulations that illuminate one of the basic forces of nature, the strong force, and its relation to protons, neutrons, quarks and gluons.
(Photo credit: Jefferson Lab.)