14 DAY TRIAL // Normally, when thinking project Titan, one might think of myths or supersized robots of doom, or both, but in this case, the subject of discussion is a supercomputer, one that is set to be the strongest ever created.
While they were a rarity at one point in the past, supercomputers can be said to exist in droves now, more or less.
This is because many a country made a point of building at least one, while the largest nations have quite a few more.
Each year, lists are made to determine both the most powerful of them all, as well as the most energy efficient.
One may or may not be surprised to know that, at present, the country owning the world's mightiest such conglomerate is none other than China.
Seeking to reestablish itself as the true leader, the US has now set the grounds for the making of the “Titan”, a high-performance computer that will be based at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) campus in Oak Ridge Tennessee.
It will employ XT3, 4 and 5 processor boxes and will make use of “Gemini” XE interconnect, all of them configured in 3D torus typology. The end result should be a creature, so to speak, capable of easily besting the Tianhe-1A.
For those that want exact performance numbers, the Titan is meant to reach 20 petaflops per second. Considering that Tianhe-1A managed 2.5 petaflops, this is a very ambitious project.
Once completed, Titan will join the Gaea, Kraken and Jaguar, three other HPC applications that already run at the ORNL site.
The first stage of delivery should be ready by the end of the ongoing year (2011), while the second stage shouldn't take longer than 2012 to finish. What remains is to see just how much the project will be able to show in terms of energy efficiency.