Titan supercomputer to heave 14 592 NVIDIA GK110 GPUs

HPC Wire reports Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has received the first batch of NVIDIA's Tesla K20 GPUs for its new Titan supercomputer. The lab's scientific computing chief, Jeff Nichols, confirmed that 32 NVIDIA GK110 based GPUs have been installed in the development platform. When the supercomputer is finished, it will have 18,688 nodes AMD's 16-core core processors and 14,592 NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPUs. Each node will have 32GB of memory, supplying 2GB per processor core. The system is anticipated to be ready by March 2013 and promises to deliver peak computing performance of 20 teraflops.

When all is said and done, the Titan supercomputer will perform at an estimated 20 peak petaflops. This will be achieved with 18,688 nodes running the latest 16-core AMD CPUs and 14,592 K20 GPUs. Each node will have 32 GB of memory, supplying 2GB per CPU core.

The upcoming system is expected to provide some healthy competition to the Sequoia supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Sequoia is currently ranked first in the world in total performance (16.32 Linpack petaflops) and energy efficiency (2,100 megaflops/watt). Titan has a shot at topping Sequoia in both categories.