Titan supercomputer breaks 20 petaflops mark with AMD CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs

Posted on Monday, October 29 2012 @ 19:54 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Supercomputer firm Cray announced the completion of world's most powerful supercomputer Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The Cray XK7 is nicknamed "Titan", it consists of 200 cabinets and delivers a peak computing power of 20 petaflops. The system features 18,688 AMD Opteron 6274 series 16-core processors and 18,688 NVIDIA Tesla K20 accelerator cards (which feature the GK110 GPU).

Titan is an updated version of the Jaguar supercomputer, at nine megawatts it has a higher peak power consumption than Jaguar's seven megawatts, but energy efficiency is significantly up as Jaguar delivered just two petaflops of computing power.

According to NVIDIA, 90 percent of Titan's computing power comes from the Tesla K20 cards.
Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. today announced the launch of the Company's new series of production hybrid supercomputers -- the Cray XK7 system -- in conjunction with today's debut of the Cray XK7 supercomputer nicknamed "Titan" located at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Titan is capable of more than 20 petaflops of high performance computing (HPC) power and is the world's most powerful supercomputer for open science.

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 was upgraded from a Cray XT5 supercomputer nicknamed "Jaguar."

The transformation from Jaguar to Titan is another significant milestone in the collaborative partnership between Cray and ORNL that has produced groundbreaking HPC accomplishments. In 2008, Jaguar set a world record for computer speed with sustained performance of more than one petaflops on two scientific applications, and the system subsequently passed that threshold a total of five times on real-world applications. In 2009, Jaguar claimed the number one spot on the list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. In October 2011, Cray announced it had received a contract to upgrade Jaguar to Titan and equip the system with NVIDIA Tesla 20-series GPUs; and today, the Cray XK7 system made its debut.

"Today's unveiling of the Titan supercomputer is an exciting moment for Oak Ridge and the Department of Energy's Office of Science, and while the system is currently going through the acceptance process, all of us at Cray share in the enthusiasm that surrounds this amazing tool for open science," said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. "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. With today's launch of the Cray XK7, we can now offer our customers the same technologies found in one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world."

The Cray XK7 system features the latest production hybrid supercomputing technologies. By combining the features of the proven high performance Gemini interconnect, the new NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPUs and the 16-core AMD Opteron processors, the Cray XK7 system is capable of scaling to more than 50 petaflops of performance.

The Cray XK7 supercomputer also features a unified CPU/GPU programming environment that provides users with validated tools, libraries, compilers and third-party software, fully integrated with the system's hardware. When combined with the Cray Linux Environment, the result is a hybrid supercomputer that blends scalable hardware, software and network. Cray XK7 customers will be able to utilize the capabilities of a multi-purpose supercomputer designed for the next-generation of many-core, HPC applications.

Upgradeable from Cray XT4, Cray XT5, Cray XT6, Cray XE6 or Cray XK6 systems, the Cray XK7 supercomputer is available now. The system can be configured in a single cabinet with tens of compute nodes, to a multi-cabinet system with tens of thousands of compute nodes.

Additional information on the Cray XK7 supercomputer, including a brochure and technical details, can be found on the Cray XK7 system page on the Cray website.

Titan is currently going through the system acceptance process. Cray will not recognize the remaining revenue associated with this system until it has been accepted, and the timing of such acceptance remains uncertain.
Cray Titan supercomputer


About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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