Titan (computer)
The Titan was a supercomputer from Cray . He was at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee ( USA ).
With a computing power of 17.59 PetaFLOPS , it was considered the most powerful supercomputer in the world from November 2012 to April 2013.
The tasks of the Titan include the calculation of models in the natural sciences . The first selected applications include S3D (a code for the numerical simulation of combustion processes, for example in diesel engines at Sandia Labs), WL-LSMS (electron calculations in magnetic materials), Non-Equilibrium Radiation Diffusion (NRDF), CAM-SE (for climate and atmosphere simulation), Denovo (nuclear reactors), LAMMPS (Large-scale Atomic / Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator). On August 1, 2019, what was once the fastest supercomputer in the world was finally shut down after almost 7 years of operation. This creates space for his successor, Frontier .
It is not to be confused with the prototype of the ATLAS -2 computer from Ferranti, also called Titan . It was developed from 1963 and was in operation at the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory in Cambridge from 1964 to 1973. In the late 1980s there was also a Titan supercomputer from Ardent.
computer
The Titan supercomputer emerged from its predecessor Jaguar, a system with Cray XT5 blades, which were replaced by Cray XK7 blades. A total of 18,688 AMD Opteron 6274 16-core processors and 18,688 Nvidia Tesla K20X GPUs were processed in the cluster. The latter are graphics processors that carry 90 percent of the computing load. Due to their processor architecture , these are particularly suitable for massively parallelizable calculations. The system has a total of 710 Tbytes of RAM, with each blade having 162 GB of memory. 13,400 hard drives with 1 TB capacity each are available for storing the results. The total capacity should (te) be expanded to 20,000 to 30,000 Tbytes in the course of 2013. The storage can store data with up to 240 GByte / s.
software
The operating system is the Cray Linux Environment, which is based on Linux . This system was specially adapted by Cray for supercomputers and is ideally suited for networked computing within large computer clusters.
Economic
The total cost is given as a total of 97 million US dollars. This relatively small amount was achieved because the existing infrastructure such as cables, power supply, blade housing and racks could be taken over from the predecessor Jaguar and only the blades had to be replaced.
Compared to its predecessor, the Titan is five times more energy efficient. The institute hopes that this will result in considerable savings in electricity costs.
Defects in the system
In February 2013 there were some qualitative deficiencies in the system. The soldering material used on the motherboards caused contact problems. The reason was the too high proportion of gold, which should actually ensure corrosion resistance. The defective components of the system were then returned to the manufacturer for repair. In April 2013 the computer was functional again.
See also
- TOP500 - List of the 500 fastest computer systems (updates every six months)
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ http://www.top500.org/lists/2012/11/
- ^ Titan website at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility
- ^ Ardent Titan, Rhode Island Computer Museum
- ↑ Titan - Cray XK7, Opteron 6274 16C 2.200GHz, Cray Gemini interconnect, NVIDIA K20x | TOP500 supercomputer sites. Retrieved November 17, 2017 .
- ↑ Supercomputer is slowed down by gold
- ↑ Titan repairs complete ( Memento from November 15, 2013 in the Internet Archive )