Meet Titan: The World’s Fastest Supercomputer

Oak Ridge National Laboratory completed their upgrade of Jaguar, which is now branded Titan. It is the fastest supercomputer in the world (at the time I’m writing this). Titan runs on Cray XK7 blades which use AMD Opteron 6274 CPUs and Nvidia Tesla K20 GPUs. It is capable of performing 20 petaFLOPS which is 20,000 trillion calculations per second. The machine has a peak theoretical performance of 24.8 petaFLOPS.

The fastest supercomputer in the world boasts 299,008 processor cores and 710 Terabytes of RAM. This is not including each GPU which contains 2,496 CUDA cores at 732 mhz, resulting in a faster overall system than any predecessor.

The DOE has awarded 4.7 billion hours of super computing at Oak Ridge as well as another facility to a total of 61 engineering and science projects with a high potential for accelerating innovation and discovery through its Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. Titan, which is fully expected to claim the official title of world’s fastest supercomputer, is actually the first hybrid CPU/GPU system that is not unlike many of the more powerful gaming rigs which combine video processor cores to help with computational operations.

Meet Titan – The World’s Fastest Supercomputer

There are six main areas of research planned for Titan, which is one of only two supercomputers that can exceed 20 petaFLOPS at this time.

Climate Change

Predict weather more accurately and answer questions about adaptation…etc.

Nuclear Energy

Simulate neutron flux in fusion and fission. This includes looking at new forms of fusion energy that would be cleaner and safer, as well as new cleaner and longer burning fuels.

Material Science Code

Looking at atomic level materials and figuring out how to construct new materials with superior strength and weight of other materials.

Biofuels

Determining which plants convert to ethanol using an enzymatic process more efficiently.

Combustion

Simulate combustions of fuels to find a cleaner burning and more efficient fuel for engines.

Astrophysics

Everything from gravitational calculations, black holes to magnetic and dark forces could be potentially run.

Image Credits: [Oak Ridge National Laboratory]