Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s latest flagship computer Titan beats the former Top500 champion – Lawrence Livermore’s Sequoia to gain World fastest supercomputer title. The new fastest one delivered 17.59 petaflops on Linpack, however theoretical peak performance is 20 petaflops – a quadrillion calculations per second.
Last year, the Department of Energy paid $97 millions to Nvidia and Cray to create the world’s fastest supercomputer.
Titan is powered by 18,688 Nvidia Tesla K20X GPUs – the fastest, most energy efficient GPU accelerators ever built. The new Titan is ten times more powerful than Jaguar. Titan delivered 2,120 megaflops/watt making it a very energy efficient one too.
U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said, “The nation that leads the world in high-performance computing will have an enormous competitive advantage across a broad range of sectors, including national defense, science and medicine, energy production, transmission and distribution, storm weather and climate prediction, finance, commercial product development, and manufacturing”.
