Titan (supercomputer)

The Titan is a supercomputer from Cray. He stands at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee (USA).

With a processing capacity of 17.59 petaflops he was from November 2012 as the most powerful supercomputers in the world, until the set is almost twice as fast Chinese Tianhe -2 ( 33.86 petaflops ) to the top of the supercomputer in June 2013.

The duties of the titanium heard computing models in the natural sciences and data analysis for the NSA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Computer

The supercomputer Titan is XT5 blades, which were replaced by Cray XK7 blades emerged from the previous Jaguar, a system with Cray. In the cluster total 18,688 AMD Opteron 6274 16-core processors and Nvidia Tesla K20X 18,688 GPUs have been processed. The latter are graphics processors that carry 90 % of the computational load. Due to their processor architecture they are particularly well suited for highly parallelizable computations. The system, a total of 710 terabytes of RAM available, each blade has 162 GB of memory. To store the results are 13400 hard drives with 1 terabyte capacity. However, the total capacity will be expanded during the year 2013 to 20-30 petabytes. The Storage can store data in the second up to 240 gigabytes.

Software

The operating system is the system Unicos, which is based on Linux. This system was specially developed for Cray supercomputers, and is ideal for networked computing within large computer cluster.

Economic

The total cost is given with a total of 97 million U.S. dollars. This relatively small amount could be achieved by the existing infrastructure such as cables, power supply, blade housing and racks could be taken from the previous Jaguar and only the blades had to be replaced.

Compared to the predecessor of the Titan has a better energy efficiency by a factor of 5. Thus, the Institute hopes to significant savings in electricity costs.

Defects in the system

In February 2013 showed the system some qualitative deficiencies. The solder used on the motherboard causing contact problems. The reason was the excessive amount of gold, which was supposed to provide corrosion resistance. The faulty components of the system were then returned to the manufacturer for repair. In April 2013, the computer was functional again.