Is the new supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Labs the most powerful machine on Earth?
It might be. But we won’t know for a few more weeks.
Uncloaked on Monday by Oak Ridge — a Tennessee lab run by the Department of Energy — the Titan supercomputer is a Cray machine made of nearly 19,000 processing units stitched together with 710 terabytes of memory.
It can perform 20 thousand trillion calculations per second, or 20 petaflops. That’s enough to put it on top of the world, for the moment at least. The world’s second-most-powerful supercomputer is Sequoia, an IBM system at Lawrence Livermore National Labs. It’s been benchmarked at just over 16 petaflops.
But the folks who keep tabs on these things are cooking up a new list of the world’s top supercomputers, and it’s not clear who’s going to end up on top. That semi-annual list is set to be published around Nov. 11, just ahead of a big supercomputing conference in Salt Lake City.
Titan is a technically interesting machine. It’s part of a new trend to use graphics processing chips to do some of the calculations. But the supercomputer is not a cinch to win, says Horst Simon, the Deputy Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who helps run the Top500 supercomputer list. “It will be a challenging race and I’m curious to see if Titan can best Sequoia in the quest for the number one spot in the Top500 list,” he said in an email interview.
The Oak Ridge boys will need to do some “careful implementation” in order to come out ahead of Sequoia in the Top500′s benchmarking tests, Simon said.
Titan is 10 times as powerful as Oak Ridge National Lab’s last big supercomputer, called Jaguar. Also built by Cray, Jaguar was on top of the world just three years ago. It ranked number six on the most-recent Top500 list.
“The order-of-magnitude increase in computational power available with Titan will allow us to investigate even more realistic models with better accuracy,” Oak Ridge said in a press release.
Oak Ridge says it will use Titan to crunch numbers for computer simulations studying energy, climate change and materials.
No comments:
Post a Comment