20petaflop Titan supercomputer unveiled
1 min read
The world's fastest open science supercomputer, Titan, has been unveiled at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
Titan has a peak performance of more than 20petaflops – or 20million billion floating point operations per second – about 90% of which comes from 18,688 NVIDIA Tesla K20 gpu accelerators based on the NVIDIA Kepler architecture.
The supercomputer will be available to researchers from academia, government laboratories and a broad range of industries, who will use it to model physical and biological phenomena.
Titan is said to be more than 10 times faster and five times more energy efficient than its predecessor, the 2.3petaflops Jaguar system, while occupying the same floor space.
"Basing Titan on Tesla gpus allows Oak Ridge to run phenomenally complex applications at scale, and validates the use of accelerated computing to address our most pressing scientific problems," commented Steve Scott, chief technology officer of the gpu accelerated computing business at NVIDIA. "You simply can't get these levels of performance, power and cost efficiency with conventional cpu based architectures. Accelerated computing is the best and most realistic approach to enable exascale performance levels within the next decade."
