Titan to become world's fastest supercomputer

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  • On Oct. 29th the U.S. Department for Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory aims begin operations of the Cray XK7 "Titan" System  - expected to be the world's fasted supercomputer which promises a speed reaching 20 petaflops or 20 quadrillion calculations per second.

    The current world record 16.32 petaflops is held by Sequoia , according to the Top500 supercomputer list. The key to Titan's speed will be the hybrid Linux combination of 16-core AMD Operon CPUs and Nvidia Kepler GPUs to overcome space and power limitations of existing supercomputers.


    Caption by: Andy Smith

  • The Titan system is a 200-cabinet Cray XK7 supercomputer.

    Titan contains 299,008 CPU cores and 18,688 GPUs to guide simulations and allow its Kepler GPUs to do the hard work. Titan will contain 700 terabytes of memory.

    Titan will take up the same space as its predecessor, Jaguar and is expected to be about ten times more powerful. Titan will also draw abou the same amount of power as Jaguar.

    Caption by: Andy Smith

  • Titan will be used to study climate change, nuclear energy, radiation transport, combustion, membrane fusion, nanoscale materials and more.

    Caption by: Andy Smith

  • Nvidia Tesla GPUs are massively parallel accelerators based on the Nvidia Cuda parallel computing platform promises to deliver a "dramatically higher application acceleration for a range of scientific and commercial applications than a CPU-only approach."

    Caption by: Andy Smith

  • Team members insert Nvidia’s Tesla K20 GPUs.

    NVIDIA and Oak Ridge National Laboratory

    Caption by: Andy Smith

  • Here's a worker assembling part of the Titan supercomputer.

    NVIDIA and Oak Ridge National Laboratory

    Caption by: Andy Smith

  • Titan allows the CPUs and the GPUs tp maximize the efficiency of applications to exploit their strengths.

    Caption by: Andy Smith

  • One of the principle tasks of Titan will be to study specific climate change adaptation and mitigation scenarios. It will attempting to predict features like precipitation patterns, statistics and tropical storms.

    Caption by: Andy Smith

  • Radiation transport – important in astrophysics, laser fusion, combustion, atmospheric dynamics, and medical imaging – computed on AMR grids.

    Caption by: Andy Smith

  • Workers install one of the final panels that make up Titans logo on the front of the supercomputer. Jaguar will essentially transform into Titan.

    NVIDIA and Oak Ridge National Laboratory

    Caption by: Andy Smith

  • Here is Jaguar which was built in 2008 and will be retired.

    Caption by: Andy Smith

  • Tian's with 299,008 processors will eclipse Jaguar's 224,256 processors.

    Caption by: Andy Smith

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The U.S. Department for Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory is ready flip the on switch on what is expected to be the world's fasted supercomputer which promises a speed reaching 20 petaflops per second.

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On Oct. 29th the U.S. Department for Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory aims begin operations of the Cray XK7 "Titan" System  - expected to be the world's fasted supercomputer which promises a speed reaching 20 petaflops or 20 quadrillion calculations per second.

The current world record 16.32 petaflops is held by Sequoia , according to the Top500 supercomputer list. The key to Titan's speed will be the hybrid Linux combination of 16-core AMD Operon CPUs and Nvidia Kepler GPUs to overcome space and power limitations of existing supercomputers.


Caption by: Andy Smith

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