Nicholas Luciano, a Spallation Neutron Source central room shift supervisor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, monitors data in this file photo.The Oak Ridge National Laboratory launched a new era of scientific supercomputing Monday with Titan, a system capable of churning through more than 20,000 trillion calculations per second.
The supercomputer, the world’s first computer capable of handling 20 petaflops per second, employs a family of processors called graphic processing units first created for computer gaming. 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.
The new computer system at the Department of Energy lab will support 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.
The Cray XK7 system contains 18,688 nodes, with each holding a 16-core AMD Opteron 6274 processor and an NVIDIA Tesla K20 graphics processing unit accelerator. Titan also has more than 700 terabytes of memory.
The combination of central processing units, the traditional foundation of high-performance computers, and more recent GPUs will allow Titan to occupy the same space as its Jaguar predecessor while using only marginally more electricity.