Titan: The Third Greenest Supercomputer

The world’s most powerful supercomputer, Titan of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was recently named as the third most energy efficient among the 500 competing supercomputers at the SC12 Supercomputing Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah.

The Green500 List is a list of 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world and ranks them according to their efficiency in terms of how much computation they can perform per watt of electricity. It is organized by Wu-Chun Feng and Kirk Cameron of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech).

The Titan owes its power to its hybrid structure, combining CPU and GPU. GPU is known to be more efficient than the generic CPU, executing around 800 times more instructions per clock than a typical CPU.  Thus, adding GPU has boosted ten times the computing power of Titan with lower power consumption compared to CPU’s.

With its more than 700-terabyte memory and 299,008 CPU cores, the Titan will absolutely aid researchers in their calculations within a shorter amount of time, hence, saving both their time and electricity.

[via EurekAlert]

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