Jaguar Supercomputer Being Upgraded To Regain Fastest Cluster Crown

MrSeb writes with an article in Extreme Tech about the Titan supercomputer. From the article: "Cray, AMD, Nvidia, and the Department of Energy have announced that the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Jaguar supercomputer will soon be upgraded to yet again become the fastest HPC installation in the world. The new, mighty-morphing computer will feature thousands of Cray XK6 blades, each one accommodating up to four 16-core AMD Opteron 6200 (Interlagos) chips and four Nvidia Tesla 20-series GCGPU coprocessors. The Jaguar name will be suitably inflated, too: the new behemoth will be called Titan. The exact specs of Titan haven't been revealed, but the Jaguar supercomputer currently sports 200 cabinets of Cray XT5 blades — and each cabinet, in theory, can be upgraded to hold 24 XK6 blades. That's a total of 4,800 servers, or 38,400 processors in total; 19,200 Opterons 6200s, and 19,200 Tesla GPUs. ... that's 307,200 CPU cores — and with 512 shaders in each Tesla chip that's 9,830,400 compute units. In other words, Titan should be capable of massive parallelism of more than one million concurrent operations. When the server is complete, towards the end of 2012, Titan will be capable of between 10 and 20 petaflops, and should recapture the crown of Fastest Supercomputer in the World from the Japanese 'K' computer."

Comments

Re:DOE projects

[Raul654]

The DOE categorizes their supercomputers into capacity machines and capability machines.

The capacity machines are the work horses - time-shared between lots of users doing a variety of applications (including material science, life science, nuclear simulation, etc). The spend pretty much their entire lives near maximum utilization.

The capability machines are the really big ones (Jaguar, Road Runner, etc) that are big enough to permit applications that are too large (require too much RAM or have absurdly long running times) to run on most systems. (Capability machines are also quite difficult to administer because none of the software they run has ever been tested at those scales)