This month Cray’s Titan supercomputer has claimed the title for the world’s fastest, beating the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Sequoia supercomputer, which previously held the first place position.

The latest Cray supercomputer named Titan is powered by a combination of CPUs and GPUs, which feature 18,688 nodes, each of which contains an AMD 16-core Opteron and a NVIDIA Tesla K20X GPU accelerator, equating to a massive 560,640 processors in total.

The 560,640 processors are capable of generating 17.59 quadrillion operations per second, beating the Sequoia supercomputer, which was only able to manage a measly 16.32 quadrillion operations a second.

"It’s not practical or affordable to continue increasing supercomputing capacity with traditional CPU-only architecture,” said ORNL’s Jeff Nichols, in a press release. "Combining GPUs and CPUs is a responsible move toward lowering our carbon footprint, and Titan will enable scientific leadership by providing unprecedented computing power for research in energy, climate change, materials, and other disciplines.”

The Cray Titan supercomputer has been built to help research materials nuclear energy research, and investigate ways to re-design the traditional combustion engines to make it more efficient. For more information and full details of the new Titan supercomputer jump over to the AMD press release.

Source: Forbes : Gizmodo