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DOE Pulse
  • Number 376  |
  • November 19, 2012

Titan supercomputer: Fast and green

Titan supercomputer

Titan supercomputer.

Titan, a supercomputer at DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is the most powerful computer in the world, according to the Top500 list, a semiannual ranking of computing systems around the world. The list was announced at the SC12 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Titan is also one of the most energy efficient supercomputers. Titan came in at number three on the Green500 list, also announced at SC12. The list takes the world’s 500 most powerful supercomputers as ranked by the Top500 list and reorders them according to how many calculations they can get per watt of electricity.

Titan is a Cray XK7 system that contains 18,688 nodes, each built from a 16-core AMD Opteron 6274 processor and an NVIDIA Tesla K20X GPU accelerator. Titan also has 710 terabytes of memory. Its hybrid architecture — the combination of traditional central processing units (CPUs) with graphic processing units (GPUs) — is largely lauded as the first step toward the goal of exascale computing, or generating 1,000 quadrillion calculations per second using 20 megawatts of electricity or less.

[Morgan McCorkle, 865.574.7308,
mccorkleml@ornl.gov]