Meet the fastest computer in the world
The Titan supercomputer has become the world’s fastest machine capable of churning through 17.59 petaflops per second (quadrillions of calculations per second).
The $100 million Titan, by the US based Cray Inc., which seized the No.1 supercomputer ranking on the Top 500 list, will be 10 times more powerful than Cray’s last world-leading system, Jaguar, which had set a world record for computer speed and claimed the No.1 spot on the list of the fastest supercomputers in 2009.
The Titan system is a 200-cabinet Cray XK7 supercomputer with 18,688 compute nodes, each consisting of a 16-core AMD Opteron 6200 Series processor and an NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPU Accelerator.
Titan is located at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US and will be used to perform calculations for materials research, nuclear energy research and analysis of techniques which can make combustion engines more efficient. Cray had last year announced that it had bagged the contract to upgrade the Jaguar to Titan.
Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray, said, "The Titan supercomputer is an incredibly powerful Cray XK7 system combining innovative technologies from companies such as AMD and NVIDIA, surrounded by a tightly-integrated Cray hardware and software infrastructure.”
Meanwhile, United States with five out of the top ten entries, continues to lead the Top 500 list of high-speed computers.
Saudi Arabia,, which holds the 52nd spot in the list and is the only country from the region in the Top 100 of the list, has a computer capable of 421.2 trillion floating point operations per second. The Sanam Adtech is housed at the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology.
China plans to outdo the Titan with its Tianhe-2 supercomputer and wants to crack the 100 petaflops barrier (five times faster than Titan). China's National University of Defence Technology is expected to complete building the machine in 2015.
It was China’s Tianhe-1A, located at the National Supercomputer Centre in Tianjin, which beat the Jaguar to earn the No.1 spot in 2010. Tianhe-1A scored 2.507 petaflops compared to Jaguar’s 2.3.