Titan: World's Fastest Supercomputer Clocked At 17.5 PetaFlops

A new supercomputer assembled at the Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee is ranked number 1 in the latest Top500 supercomputer ranking. When tested on the Linpack benchmark program collection, Titan, a Cray XK7 architecture, achieved 17.5 petaflops sustained computing throughput, which is slightly above the runner-up Sequoia BlueGene/Q at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. in California.

Titan uses an innovative approach of large scale use of GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) to supplement the processing power of CPUs (Central Processing Units). It uses 18,688 Nvidia Tesla K20X GPUs in conjunction with more than 560,640 AMD processors. GPUs are more efficient for certain types of applications and were originally developed to improve 3D graphics for high-end computer games, underscoring the point that gaming is serious business.

Like most top-ranked supercomputers, Titan uses a Linux operating system. It runs the Cray Linux Environment, which is based on SUSE 11.

BTW, one petaflop is one quadrillion (15 zeros) calculations (floating point operations) per second. For more information about Titan see the report on the Oak Ridge National Lab web site.