TechTaffy

tech:

taffy

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

By TechTaffy Desk
(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 [email protected].

 

Just in

AI

AI is ‘a new kind of digital species,’ Microsoft AI chief says — Quartz

Mustafa Suleyman, chief executive of Microsoft AI, said during a talk at TED 2024 that AI is the newest wave of creation since the start of life on Earth, and that “we are in the fastest and most consequential wave ever,” writes Britney Nguyen in Quartz.
Around the web

It’s baaack! Microsoft and IBM open source MS-DOS 4.0 — ZDNet

Microsoft and IBM have joined forces to open-source the 1988 operating system MS-DOS 4.0 under the MIT License, writes Steven Vaughan-Nichols. 
AI

Generative AI arrives in the gene editing world of CRISPR — NYT

New AI technology is generating blueprints for microscopic biological mechanisms that can edit your DNA, pointing to a future when scientists can battle illness and diseases with even greater precision and speed than they can today, writes Cade Metz.
AI

Estée Lauder, Microsoft to build AI Innovation Lab

The Estée Lauder Companies (ELC) and Microsoft Corp. announced the creation of an AI Innovation Lab to expand their global strategic relationship.
Around the web

Mark Zuckerberg says Meta will offer its virtual reality OS to hardware companies, creating iPhone versus Android dynamic — CNBC

Meta will partner with external hardware companies, including Lenovo, Microsoft and Asus, to build virtual reality headsets using the company’s Meta Horizon operating system, writes Kif Leswing.