Home High Performance Computing U.S. Department of Energy To Get $97 Million+ World’s Fastest Supercomputer

U.S. Department of Energy To Get $97 Million+ World’s Fastest Supercomputer

(Image Courtesy: ORNL)

By Sudarshana Banerjee

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has awarded a contract to Cray to vamp up its Jaguar. Before you start dreaming of cars, the Jaguar is the primary system in the ORNL Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF). Currently the Jaguar is capable of 2.3 petaflops (million billion calculations per second). The newer system, which will be called ‘Titan’ will have a peak speed between 10 and 20 petaflops.

Titan is also going to be more than two times faster and three times more energy efficient than the reigning star K supercomputer in Japan, says NVIDIA. The upgraded system will employ the latest AMD Opteron central processing units as well as NVIDIA Tesla graphics processing units.

The last phase of the upgrade is expected to be completed in late 2012. The system, which will be known as Titan, will be ready for users in early 2013. Consisting of products and services, the multi-year, multi-phase contract is valued at more than $97 million. The contract includes additional upgrade options beyond these two phases that, if exercised, would increase the total value of the contract, says Cray.

Thom Mason (Director, ORNL): Discoveries that take weeks even on a system as powerful as Jaguar might take days on Titan.

Sudarshana Banerjee is consulting editor with techtaffy.com. She can be reached at sudarshana@techtaffy.com.

 

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