A computer called Titan, which is 10 times more powerful than the last
lab machine, has claimed the title of the world's most powerful
supercomputer.
Titan uses microchips more usually used for
video-gaming to crunch numbers for climate studies, models of advanced
materials and alternatives to petrol.
The machine has seized the
top spot in the Top500 - a closely-watched global league of the fastest
supercomputers, the Telegraph reported.
Built by Cray at the US
government's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, Titan is 10
times more powerful than the lab's last supercomputer, Jaguar, which led
the world as recently as 2009.
Titan was measured at 17.59
petaflops or 17.59 thousand trillion calculations per second beating the
previous record of 16.32 petaflops, held by Sequoia, a supercomputer at
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which simulates
nuclear attacks.
It had reclaimed the crown for the United States earlier this year from the K supercomputer in Japan, the report said.
The
new champion contains almost 19,000 processing nodes and 710 terabytes
of memory. As well as a 16-core AMD CPU, each node contains an Nvidia
GPU accelerator, a specially-adapted version of processor technology
originally developed for the video gaming market.
Supercomputers
are increasingly incorporating GPUs, which consume less power for more
processing power compared to CPUs because their "parallel" architecture
allows them to perform many calculations at once.