14 DAY TRIAL // The Oak Ridge National Lab plans to add another Cray built petaflop capable supercomputer, dubbed Titan, to its HPC machine lineup in 2012, which is to be powered by a slew of Nvidia Tesla general purpose GPUs.
According to a Knoxville News Sentinel report cited by HPC Wire, this is the third Cray supercomputer to be installed at ORNL, after the 2.3 petaflop Jaguar and the 1.0 petaflop Kraken (both are Cray XT5machines).
Titan's installation will begin in 2011 and the system is expected to boot for the first time in 2012.
Menwhile, according to Jeff Nichols, associate lab director of ORNL's Computing and Computational Sciences group, the initial 2011 installation will be used as a test-bed before the full system is put into place.
As noted earlier, the machine will rely on Nvidia's Tesla general purpose GPUs to deliver most of its Flops, although, at this time, we don't know the exact specifications of the systems.
Most likely, ORNL's supercomputer will be based on the Cray XE6 design paired together with Tesla powered blades.
When completed, the Titan will cost about $100 million dollars according to Nichols, less than half the price of the 10 petaflop IBM Blue Waters system that will be installed at NCSA.
The Cray Titan won't be DOE's only 20 petaflop supercomputer to go live in 2012 as the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will also get a 20 petaflop monster built by IBM, the Blue Gene/Q "Sequoia."
The Sequoia is expected to bring the world's fastest supercomputer title back in the US as the machine should be able to deliver about 16 pataflos in the Linpack benchmark.
Right now, China holds the record for the world's fastest supercomputer with the Tianhe-1A that uses a proprietary Chinese interconnect, 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPUs as well as 14,336 Intel Xeon X5670 CPUs and has a consistent speed of 2.5 petaflops and a theoretical peak of 4.7 petaflops.