Oak Ridge’s Titan supercomputer will eventually pack as many as 18,000 Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) and have the potential to deliver 20 petaflops of peak performance, making it one of the fastest computers in the world.
Last year, Nvidia made a splash when it announced that its chips were powering the Chinese “Tianhe-1A” supercomputer, which, at that time, became the fastest in the world. As of June, the Chinese system was ranked No. 2 in the world on the Top500.org Web site. Oak Ridge’s current design was ranked No.3.
High-end GPUs typically contain hundreds of small processing cores, allowing them to accelerate certain types of computational tasks more efficiently and thereby much faster than CPUs (central processing units).
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which operates a computing facility for the U.S. Department of Energy, had been testing a small-scale system roughly modeled on the Chinese supercomputer, according to Jack Dongarra, a professor at University of Tennessee’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, who spoke to CNET last year. He is part of a group participating in the Oak Ridge project.
via Nvidia to power DOE supercomputer, one of the fastest | Nanotech – The Circuits Blog – CNET News.