Titan supercomputer hits 20 petaflops of processing power

October 29, 2012

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. The supercomputer, deployed at ORNL facilities in Tennessee, is capable of processing 20,000 trillion calculations per second. The supercomputer is more than ten times faster than its predecessor called Jaguar, which was deployed in 2009 and was considered the world's fastest supercomputer in June 2010 until it was dethroned a few months later by a Chinese supercomputer called Tianhe-1A at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin. Sequoia supercomputer Titan's deployment comes just a few weeks ahead of the release of the Top500, which lists the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world. The fastest supercomputer in the Top500 list released in June this year was Sequoia, an IBM BlueGene/Q system deployed by the U.S. DOE at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. Global competition "American competitiveness is very important from a global security and national security perspective," said Jeffrey Nichols, associate laboratory director for the computing and computational sciences directorate at ORNL, in an interview. "It's absolutely important that we are competitive in this high-tech field so the science solutions we are solving are competitive and put us on the leading edge of where we need to be in solving these problems." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2013228/titan-supercomputer-hits-20-petaflops-of-processing-power.html