Nvidia today announced that Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), which operates the world’s premier open science computing facility for the U.S. Department of Energy, will deploy a revolutionary new supercomputer, Titan. The new system will employ the latest AMD Opteron central processing units as well as NVIDIA Tesla graphics processing units — energy-efficient processors that accelerate specific types of calculations in scientific application codes. With the potential to deliver over 20 petaflops of peak performance, Titan, a Cray XK6 supercomputer, would be more than two times faster and three times more energy efficient than today’s fastest supercomputer, the K computer located in Japan. Titan will be a ground-breaking new tool for scientists to leverage the massive parallel computing power of GPUs for research and discovery.
The initial system upgrade will replace all of the processors with the latest AMD Opteron processors code named Interlagos, taking the system from two six-core processors per node to one 16-core processor per node, and facilitate the addition of GPUs.In the first phase of the Titan deployment, which is currently underway, Oak Ridge will upgrade its existing Jaguar supercomputer with 960 Tesla M2090 GPUs based on the Nvidia Fermi architecture. These GPUs will serve as companion processors to multi-core CPUs in this Cray XK6 supercomputer. In the second phase, expected to begin in 2012, Oak Ridge plans to deploy up to 18,000 Tesla GPUs based on the next-generation architecture code-named Kepler.