'World's Fastest Supercomputer' Crowned in US

[Zzbrandon]


In the clash of the world's supercomputing titans, a new U.S. supercomputer named "Titan" is king.

The $100-million Titan seized the No. 1 supercomputer ranking on the [Top500 List](http://www.top500.org/list/2012/11/) with a performance record of 17.59 petaflops per second (quadrillions of calculations per second). The supercomputer, a Cray XK7 system based at Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, leaped past the former champion, the Sequoia supercomputer at California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The top five supercomputers in the world are:

* Titan Cray XK47 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (17.59 petaflops/s)

* Sequoia BlueGene/Q at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (16.33 petaflops/s)

* Fujitsu's K computer at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan (10.51 petaflops/s)

* The Mira BlueGene/Q computer at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Ill. (8.16 petaflops/s)

* The JUQUEEN BlueGene/Q computer at the Forschungszentrum Juelich in Germany. (4.14 petaflops/s)

U.S. supercomputers had fallen behind China's Tianhe-1A supercomputer and Japan's Fujitsu K Computer starting in 2009, but staged a comeback with [Sequoia's rise](http://www.technewsdaily.com/5876-regains-supercomputing-crown.html) in 2012.

Sequoia's 1,572,864 computing cores actually outnumber Titan's 560,640 cores, but not all computing cores are created equal. Titan draws 90 percent of its performance from having 261,632 of NVIDIA's new K20x accelerator cores.

The NVIDIA accelerator cores use the same [graphics processing unit](http://graphics-cards-review.toptenreviews.com/) (GPU) technology that drives graphics cards for displaying video games. GPUs run tasks on many different "threads" that may run slower than traditional threads on central processing units (CPUs), but GPUs make up for that by running many more threads simultaneously.

GPU-driven supercomputers will become even more crucial in building the next generation of "exascale" supercomputers that would work 1,000 times faster than today's supercomputers. That's because GPUs use far less energy than the CPUs that have traditionally driven computing.

Titan used the new Tesla K20x accelerators to achieve an energy efficiency of 2,142.77 megaflops per watt (million calculations per second per watt), enough to also rank Titan No. 1 on the Green500 list of the world's most energy-efficient supercomputers.

_This story was provided by [TechNewsDaily](http://technewsdaily.com/), a sister site to LiveScience._

–---Hardware----

Titan uses the same building and 200 cabinets covering 404 m2 (4352 sq ft) that Jaguar did, simply replacing the internals. Reusing the power and cooling systems already in place for Jaguar saved the lab approximately US $20 million. Titan draws 9 [MW](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt), 2 MW more than Jaguar did, but it is almost ten times as fast in terms of [floating point](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point) calculations. Power is provided to each cabinet at 480 [V](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volts) to use thinner cables than the US standard 208 V, saving US $1 million in copper. In the event of a power failure, [carbon fibre](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fibre) [fly wheels](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_wheel) power generators that can keep the networking and storage infrastructure running for up to 16 seconds. If power is not restored within 2 seconds, diesel engines are started, taking approximately 7 seconds, and assume the role of powering the generators indefinitely. Titan's components are air-cooled with [heatsinks](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heatsink), but the air is chilled before being pumped through the cabinets. The cooling system cools water to 5.5 [°C](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celcius) (42 [°F](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit)) with a [cooling capacity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_capacity) of 6600 tons, then chills the recirculated air.

The Titan project replaced Jaguar's Cray XT5 [compute blades](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_server) with Cray XK7 blades which use [AMD](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD) [Opteron](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opteron) 6274 CPUs and [Nvidia Tesla](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Tesla)K20 GPUs. There are 18,688 nodes (2 per blade), each containing a [16-core](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicore_processor) CPU with 32 GB of RAM and a GPU with 6 GB memory. The total number of processor cores is 299,008 and the total amount of RAM is over 710 [TB](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabyte) with 10 PB of storage (made up of 10,000 7200 rpm 1 TB [hard drives](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_drive)) is available with a transfer speed of 240 GB/s. The next storage upgrade will up the figure to between 20 and 30 PB and a transfer speed of approximately 1 TB/s. Jaguar's internals were upgraded to Titan in two phases, the first of which was completed in February 2012\. Jaguars's 6-core [AMD Opteron](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Opteron) CPUs (2 per node) were replaced with half the number of 16-core Opteron 6274s (1 per node), increasing the number of CPU cores from 224,256 to 299,008.[[12]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(supercomputer)#cite_note-review-12) The system's interconnect was updated (network that allows the CPUs to communicate with each other) and the [RAM](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAM) was doubled to 600 [TB](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabyte). 960 of the nodes were also fitted with a [Fermi](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Fermi)-based Nvidia GPU; these 960 nodes were referred to as TitanDev and used to test code for Titan's full upgrade.The first phase of the upgrade increased the peak performance of Jaguar from 2.3 to 3.3 petaFLOPS.

GPUs were selected for their vastly higher parallel processing efficiency over CPUs. Although the GPUs have a slower [clock speed](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_speed) than the CPUs, each GPU contains 2,496[CUDA](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA) cores at 732 [MHz](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MHz#Computing), resulting in a faster overall system.Consequently, the CPUs cores are used to allocate tasks to the GPUs rather than for directly processing the data as in previous supercomputers.

[Zzbrandon]

I wonder if eclipse is compatible with this computer 

[cheatking]

No.

[killzoz]

That's really not the. "Fastest computer"

>_>

[Marsh]

Pretty crazy stuff, i wonder what they end up doing with these computers.

[Mal]

> Pretty crazy stuff, i wonder what they end up doing with these computers.

BitCoin mining, obviously. And please, for the love of ducking god, CITE YOUR SOURCES. It's not hard. "-Huffington Post" or "-Associated Press" would be just fine.

[tslusny]

They stolen that PC from my bedroom  

[DMF]

@ deathbeam: if they did i wanna know 1 how it fit and 2 how the got it out XD…

[Nazban]

I wonder if it's connected to the internetz, could you imagine the feeling of breaking into that thing.

[Zzbrandon]

They arent using for anything as of now just a big waste of power, they just want to show off im guessing.

[alexcunn]

That thing is awesome.  not just fast but it has a great design. Makes me wonder why we have all this speed and technology for computers but we don't understand what it is all really used for. Maybe this computer has plans for mass destruction.

[Marsh]

lol bit mining, that would be so fantastic. Its probably put to use calculating mathematical algorithms and such. Like the ones used to try to cure diseases. Or cryptology stuff.

[Zzbrandon]

> lol bit mining, that would be so fantastic. Its probably put to use calculating mathematical algorithms and such. Like the ones used to try to cure diseases. Or cryptology stuff.

Well they have to put that computer to use, I can imagine how mad they would be if a earthquake hit and destroyed it.

[Keebler Elf]

That looks like the computer that I have i my backyard warehouse.

[Mal]

> lol bit mining, that would be so fantastic. Its probably put to use calculating mathematical algorithms and such. Like the ones used to try to cure diseases. Or cryptology stuff.

You'd spend about 10 times more money on your electric bill than you'd gain in revenue from bit mining.. lol. Anyway. Yeah, I definitely think these things are rented out in chunks/cores to agencies to use for cryptology and/or research. Gotta pay the bills some how, right?

[Zzbrandon]

> That looks like the computer that I have i my backyard warehouse.

You must be very rich selling those cookies with your elves

[Mhampster]

That's a big computer.

[Geonode]

As long as it has a "use" no one calls it a waste of money, and electricity.

[Anna Comnena]

It's The Machine from Person Of Interest

[dimx]

How long do we need to wait for the pocket size version of this?

[Fogger]

The answer to life, the universe, and everything is…. 42.

[Keebler Elf]

> You must be very rich selling those cookies with your elves

We do alright. Its the pot filled cookies that are the money maker.

[Draken]

Okay yea US owns it…. BUT I bet most of the parts came from china 

[cheatking]

> Okay yea US owns it…. BUT I bet most of the parts came from china 

Or the spaceship that crash landed in a Mayan temple that made them stop working on their calendar…

[Zzbrandon]

Maybe this is the cyber armageddon the one computer that will take all over the rest.