Oak Ridge National Laboratory now has the world’s fastest supercomputer, called “Titan.”
The ranking was announced by the 40th edition of the TOP500 List of the world’s top supercomputers, which is presented twice a year, according to the organization’s statement.
Titan is a Cray XK7 system, and is used at Tennessee’s Oak Ridge lab. It achieves a 17.59 Petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second) on the Linpack benchmark.
Titan has 560,640 processors, including 261,632 NVIDIA K20x accelerator cores.
It is managed for the U.S. Department of Energy by UT-Battelle, Oak Ridge said.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Sequoia supercomputer was ranked No. 1 in June and is now in second place. It is an IBM BlueGene/Q system. It has 16.32 Petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark. Also, it was the first system with one million or more cores.
Sequoia is being used by the National Nuclear Security Administration to “provide a more complete understanding of weapons performance,” according to TechZone360.
Other top-ranked supercomputers are: No. 3 -- Fujitsu’s K computer at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe, Japan; No. 4 -- a BlueGene/Q system called “Mira” at the Argonne National Laboratory; and No. 5 -- a BlueGene/Q system named “JUQUEEN” at the Forschungszentrum Juelich in Germany.
Also ranking in the top 10 supercomputers is Stampede, a Dell PowerEdge C8220 system installed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas in Austin.
In addition, Intel provides processors for 76 percent of top 500 systems. AMD Opteron provides processors for 12 percent of the top 500. IBM Power provides processors for 10.6 percent of the top 500.
Also, the United States is the most frequent region on the supercomputer list with 251 of the top 500, Computerworld said. Europe is the second place region with 105 systems and Asia is the third place region with 123 supercomputers.
The TOP500 list was researched by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany; Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
