Titan Supercomputer upgraded: 20 petaflops

Did you buy a high powered Core i7 computer this year? If you are feeling smug, then be prepared for a reality check, because the Titan SuperComputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has recently received an upgrade.

This is the world's most powerful supercomputer for open science with a theoretical peak performance figure exceeding 20 petaflops (20,000 trillion calculations each second).

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.

Inside the Supercomputer are NVIDIA Kepler GPU's and AMD Opteron 6274 processors. Nvidia have mentioned that while AMD are involved, their GPU's are handling 90 percent of the overall load.

There are 18,688 nodes in the system, each of which hold a 16 core AMD CPU and a K20 Tesla graphics processing unit. The system is loaded with 700 terrabytes of memory.

“One challenge in supercomputers today is power consumption,” said Jeff Nichols, associate laboratory director for computing and computational sciences. “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.”

Kitguru says: Enough power for you?

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