NVIDIA-Powered Titan Becomes World's Fastest Supercomputer
It's been revealed this morning that the Titan Supercomputer is not just one impressive beast in and of itself, it's now officially the fastest on the planet. According to the TOP500 list update released this morning at the SC12 Supercomputing Conference, NIVIDA Tesla K20 GPU-accelerated Titan has indeed become the fastest supercomputer on Earth, and has out-done the rest of the supercomputers by a massive amount. Titan works with a massive 18,688 NVIDIA Tesla K20X GPU accelerators and has topped the previous record holder here near the end of 2012, that being the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Sequoia system.
The performance record that this beast now holds is a 17.59 petaflop mark as measured by the benchmark system known as Linpack – a system that measures all manner of devices all the way down to smartphones (with GPUs packed inside as well.) The Titan makes this massive stride into the future with the Tesla K20X accelerator, the "flagship of NVIDIA's accelerated computing line." NVIDIA notes that this new solution provides "the highest computing performance ever available in a single processor."
NVIDIA's claims are backed with two more benchmark results: 3.95 teraflops singleprecision and 1.31 teraflops double-precision peak floating point performance – beastly. Those come from a setup as follows: CPU results: Dual socket E5-2687w, 3.10 GHz, GPU results: Dual socket E5-2687w + 2 Tesla K20X GPUs. NVIDIA also notes that the family of processors being used here also includes the K20 (without the X) which has busted out 3.52 teraflops of single precision and 1.17 teraflops of double-precision peak performance.
The Tesla K20X and K20 GPU accelerators have brought on more than 30 petaflops of performance over the past 30 days – that's big. It's so big, in fact, that it's equivalent to the computational performance of the top 10 fastest supercomputers from 2011 combined.
In addition to being the fastest, the Tesla K20X GPU accelerator has been revealed to be three times more energy efficient than previous generation GPU accelerators – so says NVIDIA. The Titan has achieved 2,142.77 megaflops of performance per watt, this surpassing the previous most energy-efficient supercomputer on the planet as well – this according to the official Green500 list.
Have a peek at the timeline below to get more information on Titan as well as the K20 family of GPUs from NVIDIA – it's big time computing action for all!