Oak Ridge, Nov 15 (TruthDive): U.S. supercomputer called Titan the Cray XK7 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 10 times more powerful than the last lab machine has claimed the title, 'most powerful supercomputer' in the world.
The U.S. retained the top slot of world's fastest computer in June this year with the Sequoia, Linux-powered which was installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab.
Titan, which was funded by the American Department of Energy, is used for study in energy, efficient engines, climate change, materials and scientific research. Titan, a Cray XK7 system having 200 cabinets, reached the speed of 17.59 petaflops (17.59 million billion calculations per second).
The previous record of 16.32 petaflops, held by Sequoia, a supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, is used to study nuclear attacks. The Cray machine Titan reportedly has a peak capability of more than 27 petaflops.
Titan is an upgrade of a Cray system called Jaguar with added AMD chips but gets its best speed from a new Nvidia chip family that is based on the technology used to provide sophisticated graphics in video games. The new Titan contains 18,688 processing nodes each built from a 16-core AMD Opteron 6274 processor and a memory of 710 terabytes.
Titan is powered by 560,640 processors, which is actually less than the 1,572,864 cores that power Sequoia.
U.S. supercomputers had dropped behind China's Supercomputer, Tianhe-1A and Japan's Fujitsu K Computer in 2009, but staged a comeback by installing Sequoia in 2012. The machine Titan has snatched the top position in the Top 500, a closely-watched global league of the fastest supercomputers.
Another U.S. machine to debut on the Top 500 list was Stampede, a Dell supercomputer at the University of Texas, which was ranked No. 7.
Researchers claimed 251 of the top 500 list of systems were in the US, with 105 in Europe and 123 in Asia, including 72 in China. 469 out of 500 machines on the list are currently powered by Linux.
Truthdrive
