Titan named ‘world’s fastest’ supercomputer

Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Titan supercomputer has been named the fastest, most powerful in the world.

According to the TOP500 list released this morning at the SC12 supercomputing conference, Titan seized the No. 1 supercomputer ranking from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Sequoia system with a performance record of 17.59petaflops. The supercomputer contains more than 18,000 AMD Opteron processors and 710Tbyte of memory. As well as a 16core AMD cpu, each node contains a Nvidia Tesla K20X gpu accelerator, a specially adapted version of the company's processor technology originally developed for the video gaming market. Rounding out the top five systems were Fujitsu's K computer installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan (No. 3); a BlueGene/Q system named Mira at Argonne National Laboratory (No. 4); and a BlueGene/Q system named JUQUEEN at the Forschungszentrum Juelich in Germany (No. 5), which has been named the most powerful system in Europe.