Cray pegs 'Titan' to regain U.S. supercomputer supremecy
Cray's vision of the XK6 or Titan supercomputer
High-performance computing specialist Cray announced on Tuesday that it had been awarded a $97 million contract to upgrade the US's most powerful supercomputer — the Department of Energy's "Jaguar" — to a new, more powerful system called "Titan."
"In 2008, Jaguar set a world record for computer speed with sustained performance of more than a petaflop on two scientific applications, and has subsequently run five applications above that threshold," Cray said in a statement on Tuesday. "Cray and [the Oak Ridge National Laboratory] look to continue this trend as the lab's system evolves from a Cray XT5 machine to the new Cray XK6 supercomputer."
Jaguar was the world's most powerful computer until 2010, when its Rmax score of 1.7 petaflops was eclipsed by the 2.5 petaflop Chinese-made Tianhe-1A. This was superseded in turn by the 8.16 petaflops of the Japanese K Computer (gallery) in June 2011. Rmax is a score within the Linpack benchmark which the Top500 organization uses to rank computers according to how many floating-point mathematical computations they can perform in a single second. The upgrade to Jaguar is expected to yield between 10 and 20 petaflops.
For more on this story, read Cray leads US thrust for supercomputer supremacy on ZDNet UK.