Titan

In National laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy in Okridzhe deployment of the Titan supercomputer which performance reaches 20 PFLOPS came to the end with fall of 2012. The laboratory hopes that Titan will help the USA to bypass China and Japan in a race of supercomputers.

This supercomputer is capable to execute 20 trillion computing operations per second. It is ten times more, than at the Jaguar supercomputer which was deployed in National laboratory in Okridzhe in 2009, and in June, 2010 was recognized as the fastest supercomputer in the world. However, in several months in a race behind performance it was bypassed by the Chinese Tianhe-1A supercomputer installed in the National supercomputer center in Tianjin.

Deployment of Titan began literally in several weeks after the publication of the next rating Top500. As of June, 2012 the Sequoia supercomputer — the IBM BlueGene/Q system installed in Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Livermore was considered as the most productive.

Preserving by the American computers of competitiveness plays an essential role in strengthening of national and global security, consider in laboratory.

Japan and China quickly increase the computing power of supercomputers which are in top five today. But the USA uses the available computing resources in the course of the solution of some difficult scientific tasks more effectively.

"Our application developers can use a part of resources of these machines free of charge — the associate director of laboratory on ADP equipment Jeffrey Nichols reported. — And in China cannot. According to the Chinese business case, when carrying out researches people should come and pay for use of the machine".

The laboratory in Okridzhe satisfies requests of scientists. Annually here 40 projects between which computing powers are distributed are selected. Offers are selected by scientific experts taking into account merits of authors. Besides, it is necessary to provide scalability of applications the available resources did not stand idle. For Titan use the payment is not levied from scientists.

Increase in computing power stimulates further expansion of knowledge and helps to increase realness of modeling and carrying out experiments. The Titan supercomputer is used to carrying out researches in the field of biosciences and in the power sphere and also when studying climate and space.

Developments of internal combustion engines which would have the increased efficiency are conducted and polluted the environment less. Experiments allow to achieve additional economy, to protect surrounding space and to strengthen national security, and more productive supercomputers promote acceleration of the conducted researches.

The Titan model represents the Cray XK7 supercomputer in which 18,688 16-core Opteron 6274 AMD processors are coupled to 18,688 graphic processors Nvidia Tesla K20. Graphic processors help to accelerate carrying out scientific and mathematical computations, and normal processors are suitable for accomplishment of consecutive calculations better.

Titan is placed in 200 server cabinets and has approximately the same dimensions, as Jaguar. Its upgrade was performed due to transition to 16-core central processors and the latest graphic processors which work quicker and consume less electric power. Amount of RAM of Titan is 700 Tbyte.

The supercomputer consumes about 9 megawatts of the electric power, and accounts for electricity add to its cost up to 10 million dollars a year. According to Nichols, the Ministry of Energy understands need of carrying out researches and is ready to defray these expenses.

Overcoming by 2018 a level in 1 EFLOPS (1024 PFLOPS) should become the next stage in development of supercomputers. It is expected that Titan will be seriously updated in 2016. A system with a performance of one exaFLOPS is going to be put into operation by 2020.