You think your new iMac is powerful? It's got nothing on the Department of Energey's (DOE) newest toy, the Titan system, which is now the world's most powerful supercomputer.
The Titan will be housed at the DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory facility in Oak RIdge, Tennessee. The supercomputer will be able to handle more than 20,000 trillion calculations per second (20 petaflops) thanks to "18,688 nodes, with each holding a 16-core AMD Opteron 6274 processor and an NVIDIA Tesla K20 graphics processing unit (GPU) accelerator." The system also boasts 700 terabytes of memory. This makes it 10 times more powerful than the DOE's old supercomputer, the Jaguar.
The Titan, aslo known as the Cray XK7, will be used for researching energy, climate change, efficient engines, materials and other disciplines. It will be the most energy-efficient supercomputer ever made, as well.
"One challenge in supercomputers today is power consumption," said Jeff Nichols, associate laboratory director for computing and computational sciences at ORNL. "Combining GPUs and CPUs in a single system requires less power than CPUs alone and is a responsible move toward lowering our carbon footprint. Titan will provide unprecedented computing power for research in energy, climate change, materials and other disciplines to enable scientific leadership.
Because of the combination of the many CPUs and GPUs, scientiest will be able to conduct scientifict caluclations with greater speed and accuracy.
