Titan: Top U.s. Supercomputer Guns For Fastest In World

[Spartan]

A new kind of global arms race is unfolding -- and this one is measured in petaflops.

Titan, the U.S. Department of Energy's top open science computer, is going live on Monday with an upgrade that will likely make it the fastest supercomputer on the planet. At 20 petaflops -- that's 20 quadrillion calculations each second -- Titan outperforms by four petaflops the DOE's Sequoia supercomputer, which has held the crown since June. The official "Top 500" ranking of the world's fastest supercomputers will be announced next month.

The United States is back on top of the computing world after ceding ground to Japan, China and Germany over the past three years. That's not just a badge of honor: It's also critical to national security and the country's economic viability.[i][color=#ff0000][size=5][b] Titan will help U.S. scientists pioneer research into climate change, biofuels, nuclear energy, new materials and other crucial fields, which will help them create the next wave of car batteries, switchgrass ethanol and improved weather forecasting tools -- all developed in America.[/b][/size][/color][/i]

Formerly known as Jaguar, the Cray ([url="http://money.cnn.com/quote/quote.html?symb=CRAY&source=story_quote_link"]CRAY[/url]) supercomputer at the DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory got a major upgrade and an appropriately intimidating new name.

[i][size=5][b][color=#ff0000]Titan replaced its predecessor's 224,256 central processing units (CPUs) with 299,008 faster CPUs made by AMD [/color][color=#ff0000]([/color][url="http://money.cnn.com/quote/quote.html?symb=AMD&source=story_quote_link"][color=#ff0000]AMD[/color][/url][color=#ff0000], [/color][url="http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2012/snapshots/756.html?iid=EL"][color=#ff0000]Fortune 500[/color][/url][color=#ff0000])[/color][color=#ff0000], along with 18,688 graphics processing units (GPUs) made by Nvidia [/color][color=#ff0000]([/color][url="http://money.cnn.com/quote/quote.html?symb=NVDA&source=story_quote_link"][color=#ff0000]NVDA[/color][/url][color=#ff0000])[/color][color=#ff0000]. The GPUs serve as accelerators to the CPUs. That's why Titan has just a third more central processors and the same number of computing nodes and cabinets as Jaguar, but delivers 10 times the performance.[/color][/b][/size][/i]
[i][color=#ff0000][size=5][b]Even more crucially, Titan's processors are five times more energy-efficient than their predecessors.[/b][/size][/color][/i]


Power constraints are the biggest challenge in the race to maximize speed. Running at just 2.3 petaflops, Jaguar required 7 megawatts of energy -- the same amount of electricity required to power 7,000 homes. The cost of simply plugging in Jaguar was $7 million last year.

If Jaguar had been expanded with CPUs, not GPUs, a 20 petaflop machine would have required 60 megawatts of power, at a cost of $60 million. That would have been a dealbreaker.

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory says Titan's energy costs are very slightly higher than Jaguar's. The system's design is "a responsible move toward lowering our carbon footprint," says Jeff Nichols, laboratory director at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

[Spartan]

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