TITAN: World's new fastest supercomputer uses NVIDIA GPU tech to reach new speedy heights
The TITAN system housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been crowned the world’s fastest computer. Usurping IBM’s Sequoia, the supercomputer took three years to build the 200 cabinet PC, hitting new heights by using NVIDIA GPU tech similar to what you’d find in top-end consumer gaming PC.
Compared to its Oak Ridge predecessor the Jaguar, which ran on traditional CPU chips, TITAN uses GPU tech to hit high speeds more efficiently:
“Titan’s peak performance is more than 20 petaflops – or 20 million billion floating-point operations per second – about 90 percent of which comes from 18,688 NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPU accelerators,” reads a statement on the NVIDIA site.
“Science and technology have always been our primary goal, and Titan is a groundbreaking tool that will allow researchers worldwide to leverage GPU-accelerated computing to make unparalleled breakthroughs,” said Oak Ridge’s associate lab director for computational sciences, Jeff Nichols.
“The new Tesla GPU accelerators offer the performance and energy efficiency that enable Titan to scale to unprecedented performance levels without consuming the energy equivalent of a small city.”
TITAN will be used as an “open-science” system, letting the leading thinkers of today calculate answers to some of the universes most complex mysteries.
But, the biggest question of all remains unanswered: can it run Crysis?
