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by Mark Ollig
The largest energy and
science research laboratory in the US Department of Energy (DoE) is the Oak
Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL,) located in Tennessee.
ORNL was established in
1943 as part of the Manhattan Project during World War II.
The state of Tennessee,
along with universities and industries, partner with ORNL to find answers to
challenges in advanced materials, physics, manufacturing, security, and energy.
The ORNL annual budget is
$1.65 billion, and is staffed by more than 4,400 people.
The completion of a new
supercomputer; its hardware provided and designed by the Cray supercomputer
company, was announced by ORNL.
The late Seymour Cray, who
was called “the father of supercomputing” founded Cray Research in 1972.
Cray has a Minnesota
connection. He received his Bachelor of science degree in electrical
engineering at the University of Minnesota, where he graduated in 1949.
The new supercomputer is
called Titan, and is an upgrade from a previous supercomputer version called
Jaguar.
Titan was recently
declared the world’s fastest computational computer.
The LINPACK benchmarks are
a measurement of a computer system’s floating-point computational performance.
Titan’s LINPACK benchmark
test results were 17.59 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point operations per
second).
A petaflop is equivalent
to one thousand-trillion (quadrillion) mathematical operations performed every
second, so, yes, this is one fast-operating, number-crunching computer.
This bests the previously
fastest supercomputer, the IBM Sequoia, which operated at 16.32 petaflops.
By comparison, a standard
hand-held calculator operates at about 10 flops.
The Titan supercomputer
has a potential processing speed of 20 petaflops.
This supercomputer’s
processing power is mind-boggling. An analogy would be if each of the 7 billion
people on the planet were making 3 million calculations – per second.
This type of performance,
according to ORNL, will enable researchers to obtain unparalleled accuracy in
their simulations and obtain research breakthroughs faster than ever before.
The Titan supercomputer
boasts almost 19,000 central processors, made up from 299,008 individual AMD
Opteron processing cores, 710 TB (terabytes) of random access memory (RAM), and
10 PB (petabytes) of data storage memory.
More than 177 trillion –
yes, that’s “trillion” with a “t” transistors are used in the Titan
supercomputer.
Power consumption of the
Titan is rated at 12.7 MW (megawatts).
The Titan supercomputer is
made up of rows of some 200 cabinet enclosures covering over 4,352 square feet
of floor space, which is almost the size of a basketball court.
There are metal pipes
traversing atop these cabinets carrying coolant to dissipate the heat generated
by the computing components inside Titan.
What is the cost for all
of this supercomputing power? $97 million.
“Titan will allow
scientists to simulate physical systems more realistically and in far greater
detail,” said James Hack, director of ORNL’s National Center for Computational
Sciences.
The Titan supercomputer is
linked to the DoE’s Energy Sciences Network (ESNET) via a 100Gbps backbone.
“As scientists are asked
to answer, not only whether the climate is changing, but where and how, the
workload for global climate models must grow dramatically,” said Kate Evans of
ORNL. “Titan will help us address the complexity that will be required in such
models,” she added.
The Titan supercomputer
will provide information for modeling climate change, determining weather
patterns, nuclear energy models, various technology applications, the
calculations needed in researching more efficient biofuels, and developing
better energy-efficient engines for vehicles.
I can only imagine how fun
it would be playing the video game, Diablo III, using the Titan supercomputer.
