Titan becomes the world's most powerful supercomputer

Developed in the United States, Titan is the most powerful supercomputer on Earth, a machine poised to take the lead in the competition between Europe, Asia and America, measured in petaFLOPS (quadrillions of operations per second).

www.ornl.gov
It can carry out 20 quadrillion calculations per second
Thanks to Titan the U.S. hopes to remain the world leader when it comes to boasting the most powerful supercomputer, after Japan, China and Germany topped the list in recent years.
Titan is a supercomputer belonging to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the State of Tennessee. It offers the same capacity as half a million laptops together, i.e. 20 petaFLOPS, which means that it can run 20 quadrillion calculations per second, which should enable it to make scientific progress in record time. In this way it is expected to expedite research on topics related to climate change, nuclear energy and biofuels.
"One of the challenges with today's supercomputers is power consumption," explains Jeff Nichols, Associate Director at the ORNL. Its creators have managed to make the new machine 10 times faster and 5 times more energy-efficient than Jaguar, its predecessor.
In addition, Titan features the peculiarity that its combination of video cards, usually used in systems employed to design and run video games with conventional microprocessors, provides 90% of its power.
Thus, this new computer should surpass the greatest Japanese and Chinese units, while overtaking IBM's Sequoia, also owned by the DOE, whose 16.32 petaFLOPS had topped the list of the most powerful supercomputers since June.
The manufacturer, Cray Inc., one of today's leaders in the supercomputers market, has announced that it has already completed the machine’s assembly and fine-tuning stage. However, the official list of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers will be released in November.
Full text at: http://actualidad.rt.com/ciencias/view/57359-titan-se-convierte-superordenador-potente-mundo