Titan-The Fastest Supercomputer In The World

THE TITAN

Introducing the newest kid on the block in the fast paced world of supercomputing…THE TITAN.

 

The Titan is a Supercomputer built by Cray at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.Titan is an upgrade of Jaguar, a previous supercomputer at Oak Ridge, to use graphics processing units (GPUs) in addition to conventional central processing units (CPUs), and is the first such hybrid to perform over 10 petaFLOPS. The upgrade began in October 2011, commenced stability testing in October 2012 and it will be available to researchers in early 2013. The initial cost of the upgrade was US$60 million, funded primarily by the United States Department of Energy.

The $100-million Titan seized the No. 1 supercomputer ranking on the Top500 List with a performance record of 17.59 petaflops per second (quadrillions of calculations per second). The supercomputer, a Cray XK7 system based at Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, leaped past the former champion, the Sequoia supercomputer at California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

how fast?

Titan has AMD Opteron CPUs in conjunction with Nvidia Tesla GPUs to maintain energy efficiency while providing an exponential increase in computational power over Jaguar. It uses 18,688 CPUs paired with an equal number of GPUs to perform at a theoretical peak of 27 petaFLOPS; however, in the LINPACK benchmark used to rank supercomputers by speed it performed at 17.59 petaFLOPS. This was enough to take first place in the November 2012 ranking by the TOP500 organisation.

To put it simply that kind of computer power is unheard of.So who is going to use this for finding out the next interstellar secret.It is available for use for any purpose.

U.S. supercomputers had fallen behind China's Tianhe-1A supercomputer and Japan's Fujitsu K Computer starting in 2009, but staged a comeback with Sequoia's rise in 2012.

 

Sequoia's 1,572,864 computing cores actually outnumber Titan's 560,640 cores, but not all computing cores are created equal. Titan draws 90 percent of its performance from having 261,632 of NVIDIA's new K20x accelerator cores.

The NVIDIA accelerator cores use the same graphics processing unit (GPU) technology that drives graphics cards for displaying video games. GPUs run tasks on many different "threads" that may run slower than traditional threads on central processing units (CPUs), but GPUs make up for that by running many more threads simultaneously.

GPU-driven supercomputers will become even more crucial in building the next generation of "exascale" supercomputers that would work 1,000 times faster than today's supercomputers. That's because GPUs use far less energy than the CPUs that have traditionally driven computing.

Titan used the new Tesla K20x accelerators to achieve an energy efficiency of 2,142.77 megaflops per watt (million calculations per second per watt), enough to also rank Titan No. 1 on the Green500 list of the world's most energy-efficient supercomputers.