Oak Ridge has just signed a contract with Cray Inc., (NASDAQ:CRAY) to deliver a supercomputer based on processors from AMD and graphics for visualization from NVIDIA.
AMD will deliver Opteron processors for the raw processing power for the titan supercomputer that is estimated to be able to deliver a performance of somewhere between 10 and 20 petaflops, according to the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratories. The computer will have a total memory of 600 TB.
The current record is held by the K Computer at Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan. The K Computer broke the previous much talked about record of 2.5 petaflops held by the Tianhe-1a system in Tianjin, China.
The new titan supercomputer is an upgrade to the current Jaguar that has a peak performance of 2.3 petaflops. The Titan Cray XK6 system will offer advanced capabilities in modeling and simulation, according to Oak Ridge Labs.
It will run computationally intense numerical experiments focused on Dept. of Energy priorities in energy technology and science research, including the assisting in the commercially viable production of biofuels and biomaterials from cellulosic materials like switch grass and trees, according to Oak Ridge Labs.
The initial system upgrade will replace all of the Jaguar processors with the latest AMD Opteron processors, codenamed “Interlagos,” taking the system from two six-core processors per node to one 16-core processor per node, Oak Ridge Labs said. The initial system upgrade will also facilitate the addition of graphics processing units (GPUs), it said. S|A
Mads Ølholm
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