TITAN Hits Government Installation

OK, so I admit to using a sensationalist headline to grab your attention and wish all my readers a Happy New Year! That’s not the only reason however.

The CES (Consumer Electronics Show) kicks off in Las Vegas, Nevada, tomorrow, (Jan 8-11) and I will be bringing you all the interesting things in the world of tech that you can look forward to.

To celebrate the new year, and CES, I wanted to talk to you about TITAN, the world’s newest and fastest supercomputer, (which happens to be in the USA!). It is so big, it even has a Wikipedia page about it.

Deep within the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, the power switch was flipped, and a giant came to life. The world’s fastest supercomputer came online,  When this happened, it bumped Sequoia down to #2.

Twice per year, Top 500 ranks the fastest supercomputers in the world. This is convenient timing, as this coincides with the 20th year for Top500, and its 40th list.

So, what does it take to be the fastest supercomputer on planet earth? Sit down and hold on…

Titan is a Cray XK7 system that hit 17.59 Petaflop/s (that’s QUADRILLIONS of calculations per second) on the Linpack benchmark. Titan features over half a million (560,640) processors, including 261,632 Nvidia K20x accelerator cores.

And what do you do with a beast of a machine like Titan?

Titan is open, available for any purpose; however, selection for time on the computer depends on the importance of the project, the project’s potential to fully utilize the hybrid architecture of Titan, and the project must run on other supercomputers to avoid dependence solely on Titan. Six “vanguard” codes were selected to be the first to run on Titan dealing mostly with molecular physics, or climate models, but other projects are also queued for use of Titan.

What’s next? Well, we are literally on the verge of the first Exaflop supercomputer, one Quintillion calculations in a single second.

What do you think? I would love your thoughts and comments. You can Email me directly at drtechblog@gmail.com and I will reply to as many of your messages as possible, maybe using some questions and answers in a future post.

J. D. Redmond  ~ “Dr. Tech” ~ http://www.DrTech.co

 

Jacques Redmond

About Jacques Redmond

I'm an I.T. Security Professional, Technology Analyst, Consultant, & Tech Writer Protecting You From Viruses, Malware, Trojans, Hackers, and other Cyber Threats. I enjoy taking complicated subjects, and putting them in a way that's easy for everyone to understand. My site INFORMATIONWARFARE.US gives free advice to combat threats to your system.