Engineering On The Edge

Oak Ridge National Laboratory is on its way to hosting what could be the world’s fastest supercomputer. The lab received the first of the next-generation NVIDIA Kepler GPUs that will be used to transform its Cray Jaguar supercomputer into the 20-petaflop Titan.

According to a report by Knoxville News Sentinel blogger Frank Munger, Oak Ridge has installed 32 Keplers, and expected delivery of another 1,000 in September.

If the project is completed soon, then Titan may wind up topping the next Top500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers, due out in November. However, the target date for going online with the new system is in March 2013.

The Department of Energy approved the purchase of 14,592 K20 HPC cards (based on the NVIDIA GK110 GPU) for Titan. The existing Jaguar system has been decommissioned for a period of two to three months as part of the final phase of the transition.

Source: Knoxville News Sentinel