Nvidia Powers World’s Fastest Supercomputer

 

  • The new Titan computer
  • Performance record of 17.59 petaflops
  • Computational performance of last year's 10 fastest supercomputers combined

Nvidia's newly unveiled graphics accelerator, the Nvidia Tesla K20X, is said to be powering the world’s fastest computer – the new Titan!

 

  • The new Titan computer
  • Performance record of 17.59 petaflops
  • Computational performance of last year's 10 fastest supercomputers combined

Nvidia's newly unveiled graphics accelerator, the Nvidia Tesla K20X, is said to be powering the world’s fastest computer – the new Titan!

According to Nvidia, its new chip boasts the highest performance, but also manages to be the most energy efficient.

The 18,688 Tesla K20X GPU accelerators propel the Titan to record 17.59 petaflops, or 17.59 quadrillion calculations per second.

"We are taking advantage of Nvidia GPU architectures to significantly accelerate simulations," says Thomas Schulthess, professor of computational physics at ETH Zurich and director of the Swiss National Supercomputing Center.

According to the professor, such simulations will benefit fields of climate and meteorology, seismology, astrophysics, fluid mechanics, materials science and molecular biophysics.

Nvidia also mentioned that its chip has enabled more than 30 petaflops of performance delivered in the last 30 days. This is equivalent to the computational performance of last year's 10 fastest supercomputers combined.

The Titan supercomputer is currently located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

K20 GPUs are going out to labs and universities worldwide and will serve early customers in the U.S., including Clemson University, Indiana University, Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Southern California.

International locations King Abdullah University of Science and Technology and Shanghai Jiao Tong University are also destined to be part of the exclusive K20 GPU club.