October 31, 2012
The new computer, named Titan, is capable of making more than 20,000 trillion calculations each second (20 petaflops), according to officials at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). That is roughly equivalent to each of the world’s seven billion people being able to carry out three million calculations per second, according to ORNL. Titan also has more than 700 terabytes of memory.
The numbers just end up so big that I struggle to come up with a way to explain it,’ said Buddy Bland, the project director of ORNL’s Leadership Computing Facility. ‘It’s unimaginable. Twenty petaflops is [the number] 20 followed by 15 zeros.’
Titan is actually an upgrade to ORNL’s previous world’s best supercomputer, Jaguar. According to Bland, The new unit is roughly the same size as Jaguar, but is 10 times more powerful. Its components occupy a space about the area of a basketball court and are about two and a half meters high.
Titan, which cost $100 million, according to ORNL officials, is expected to be useful for researchers in numerous fields.
Titan will allow scientists to simulate physical systems more realistically and in far greater detail,’ said James Hack, director of ORNL's National Center for Computational Sciences. ‘The improvements in simulation fidelity will accelerate progress in a wide range of research areas such as alternative energy and energy efficiency, the identification and development of novel and useful materials, and the opportunity for more advanced climate projections.’…”
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