Titan supercomputer debuts

The U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory on Monday completed the deployment of a 20- petaflop supercomputer called Titan, which the lab hopes will give the U.S. an edge over China and Japan in the race to build the world's fastest computers. It contains 18,688 nodes, each based around a 16-core AMD Opteron 6274 processor and an NVIDIA Tesla K20 graphics processing unit (GPU) accelerator, and has more than 700 terabytes of memory.

The computer, an update to the Jaguar system, is operated in Tennessee by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, part of the DOE's network of research labs. Researchers from academia, government labs, and various industries will be able to use Titan - believed to be one of the two most powerful machines in the world - to research things such as climate change and alternative fuels.

"One challenge in supercomputers today is power consumption," says 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."

"Titan will allow scientists to simulate physical systems more realistically and in far greater detail," ORNL's National Center for Computational Sciences director James Hack said in a statement. "The improvements in simulation fidelity will accelerate progress in a wide range of research areas such as alternative energy and energy efficiency, the identification and development of novel and useful materials, and the opportunity for more advanced climate projections."

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