Titan to become world's fastest supercomputer

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.

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

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."

Team members insert Nvidia’s Tesla K20 GPUs.

NVIDIA and Oak Ridge National Laboratory

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

NVIDIA and Oak Ridge National Laboratory

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

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.

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

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

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

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