The Department of Energy (DoE) has unveiled the Titan supercomputer, a powerful system capable of tackling complex calculations @ 20 petaflops.
The Titan supercomputer is operated by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee - which is part of the DoE's network of research labs - and comes as an update to the Jaguar system. Under the hood the supercomputer packs Nvidia Kepler GPUs and AMD Opetron 6274 processors. Nvidia pointed out that its graphics chips are actually carrying 90 percent of the overall load.
The Titan is considered one of the two most powerful machines in the world, and researchers from government labs, academia, and various industries will be able to use the supercomputer to research complex things such as climate change and alternative fuels.
"The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory launched a new era of scientific supercomputing today with Titan, a system capable of churning through more than 20,000 trillion calculations each second - or 20 petaflops - by employing a family of processors called graphic processing units first created for computer gaming," explains the press release on Monday, Oct. 29.
"Titan will be 10 times more powerful than ORNL's last world-leading system, Jaguar, while overcoming power and space limitations 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, efficient engines, materials and other disciplines and pave the way for a wide range of achievements in science and technology."
Titan employs 299,008 CPU cores in total, sixteen to each of 18,688 nodes. Moreover, each node also has an Nvidia Tesla K20 graphics accelerator. While the cores will be used to guide the simulations, the GPUs will do the actual data crunching. Titan is also capable of simulating one to five years of computing time, while Jaguar took a day to work through roughly three months of data.
Researchers will be able to access Titan by arrangement to crunch their own data. Final testing is currently underway, and the supercomputer's first year will be mainly dedicated to the DoE's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program.
Titan will come fully online at the ORNL in late 2012 or early 2013, and is expected to become the most powerful supercomputer in the world.
