Titan supercomputer performs over 20,000 trillion calculations per second

30th October 2012

The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory has just launched "Titan" – the fastest and most powerful supercomputer ever built.

This system can churn through over 20,000 trillion calculations per second – 20 petaflops – by using 18,688 nodes, each holding a 16-core AMD Opteron 6274 processor and an NVIDIA Tesla K20 graphics processing unit (GPU). Titan also has access to 700 terabytes of memory. This machine will be 10 times more powerful than Jaguar, the laboratory's previous world-leading system, while overcoming limitations of power and space inherent in the previous generation of high-performance computers.

Titan, which is supported by the Department of Energy, will provide unprecedented computing power for research in energy, climate change, nanotechnology, medicine and other areas, paving the way for a wide range of achievements in science and technology. The combined hybrid of central processing units (CPUs) and more recent graphics processing units (GPUs) allows Titan to occupy the same space as its predecessor while using only marginally more electricity.

"Titan will allow scientists to simulate physical systems more realistically and in far greater detail," said James Hack, director of ORNL's National Center for Computational Sciences. "The improvements in simulation fidelity will accelerate progress in a wide range of research areas such as alternative energy and efficiency, identification and development of novel and useful materials and the opportunity for more advanced climate projections."

Using a grid of 14-kilometre cells, the new system will be able to simulate up to five years per day of computing time, up from the three months or so that Jaguar was able to churn through in a day. For more information, visit Titan's official website.

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