Titan supercomputer hits 20 petaflops of processing power - simontonwitedingued

The U.S. Department of Push's Oak tree Ridge National Laboratory connected Monday completed the deployment of a 20-petaflop supercomputer known as Titan, which the research lab hopes wish give the U.S. an butt on ended China and Japan in the rush along to build the worldly concern's quickest computers.

The supercomputer, deployed at ORNL facilities in Tennessee, is capable of processing 20,000 trillion calculations per secondly. The supercomputer is much than ten times faster than its predecessor titled Jaguar, which was deployed in 2009 and was reasoned the world's fastest supercomputer in June 2010 until it was dethroned a a few months later by a Chinese supercomputer named Tianhe-1A at the National Supercomputer Center in Tientsin.

Titan's deployment comes just a 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 discharged in June this year was Redwood, an IBM BlueGene/Q scheme deployed by the U.S. Energy at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California.

Global contest

"Land competitiveness is very important from a globose security and national surety perspective," aforementioned Jeffrey Nichols, associate laboratory conductor for the computing and computational sciences directorate at ORNL, in an interview. "It's absolutely important that we are competitive therein commanding-tech field thus the science solutions we are solving are competitive and put down us on the lead edge of where we need to make up in resolution these problems."

Countries such as Japan and Taiwan are swiftly scaling their computing capabilities with supercomputers in the top five, Nichols said. But the U.S. makes more effective use of addressable computing power to solve some of the upper skill problems in the country, Nichols said.

"If you look at Oak Ridgeline and what we bring to the table is that we take in application developers that can use these machines at scale. Republic of China cannot. They have an economic development exemplary that says we'll put this hardware on the floor and people can enter upon and pay for using the machine in order to do their scientific research," Nichols said.

ORNL welcomes proposals from scientists and 40 projects are selected every year to use computing facilities in the lab. The proposals are selected on merit by scientific experts, but also by ensuring the applications are scalable and then resources are not wasted. Scientists using Colossus don't have to pay for usage.

More computing mogul boosts knowledge breakthrough, and helps in more realistic simulation and experiments, Nichols said, adding that Titan will supporte the U.S. in research areas like biosciences, climate, muscularity and space.

For representative, ORNL conducts research on neutron sciences, which includes the edifice of burning engines that deliver lower emissions and high efficiency. Those experiments are related to the area's economy, environment and national security, and faster supercomputers corresponding Heavyweight are advancing research faster in that sphere, Nichols same.

[See also IBM Thomas Augustus Watson's Ancestors: A Look at Supercomputers of the Past]

Titus specs

Titan is a Cray XK7 supercomputer, which pairs 18,688 High Micro Devices 16-core Opteron 6274 CPUs with 18,688 Nvidia Nikola Tesla K20 GPUs (nontextual matter processing units). Graphics processors provide faster execution of some knowledge domain and maths applications, while CPUs are better for in series processing. Past harnessing the joint computing power of CPUs and GPUs, supercomputers are capable to provide results in the just about power-timesaving way, aforesaid Steve George C. Scott, chief technology military officer of the Tesla product line at Nvidia.

Colossus is built into 200 server cabinets, which is the same sizing as Jaguar. ORNL upgraded by moving to 16-core CPUs and the latest art processors, which are faster and more power economic. Titan has 700TB of memory.

Behemoth consumes about 9 megawatts of power and the energy costs for moving the supercomputer could impart up to $10 million a year, Nichols said. The Energy Department is uncoerced to absorb the cost because it knows that a sophisticated research program is needed, Nichols said.

The adjacent milestone for supercomputers is to reach exaflop performance, which is astir 1000 petaflops, aside 2022. ORNL upgrades the supercomputer at a three to four year clip, and Nichols expects a starring ascent to Titan in 2022. Atomic number 2 also hopes an exaflop system of rules will cost in put away at ORNL by 2022, though he added null was predestinate.

"We have to think about making the case for the 2022 exascale machine or 2022 political machine. We take to start lecture vendors about those machines," Nichols aforementioned.

Agam Shah of Iran covers PCs, tablets, servers, chips and semiconductors for IDG News Service. Follow Agam on Twitter at @agamsh. Agam's e-mail address is agam_shah@idg.com

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/455489/titan-supercomputer-hits-20-petaflops-of-processing-power.html

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