The U.S Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) might house the most powerful supercomputer in the world-- the Titan a machine able to work out to 20000 trillion calculations per second (or 20 petaflops).
A Cray creation, the Titan contains 18688 nodes and 710 terabytes of memory. Interestingly enough, each node carries an Nvidia Tesla K20 GPU as well as a 16-core AMD Opteron 6274 processor, a nod at the current trend of using graphics hardware for non-graphics work.
But is it truly the most powerful supercomputer in the world? That decision falls on the group running the Top500 list, the semi-annual global supercomputer ranking.
Titan is 10x more powerful than its ORNL predecessor-- Jaguar, a former Top500 leader and current #6 position holder. However it has to beat the current champion, Sequoia, the 16 petaflop IBM system at Lawrence Livermore National Labs.
Supercomputer leader or not, Titan will find use crunching numbers for simulations studying energy, climate change and materials.
