Nvidia and AMD Inside Titan: Fastest Supercomputer on Earth
Replaces Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Sequoia at the top spot.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Titan supercomputer is now the most powerful machine on the planet.
The machine, which is powered via Nvidia's graphics processors and AMD computer chips, knocked off the top spot previously occupied by another U.S. machine, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Sequoia.
Sequoia, a system that utilizes IBM processors, became the top computer in June due to a performance of 16.32 petaflops a second. Titan bested Sequoia with a result of 17.59 petaflops per second.
Built by Cray, the supercomputer is operated in Tennessee as part of the Department of Energy's network of research labs. Titan will be used by researchers from academia, government labs and several industries in order to research topics such as alternative fuels and climate change.
The machine combines graphics chips (GPUs) and standard microprocessors. Nvidia provides the GPUs, while AMD supplies the CPUs.

Writing, "petaflops per second", is redundant. 'petaflops' already includes 'per second', hence
the 'ps' at the end, or does Titan exhibit the world's first excelarative performance?
Other than that, thanks for the update! Surprised it was only 17.59 though, I was expecting
it to be higher.
Ian.
Writing, "petaflops per second", is redundant. 'petaflops' already includes 'per second', hence
the 'ps' at the end, or does Titan exhibit the world's first excelarative performance?
Other than that, thanks for the update! Surprised it was only 17.59 though, I was expecting
it to be higher.
Ian.
I'm pretty sure that "excelerative" isn't a word and even if it was, it'd probably be spelled more like accelarative.
Regardless, good catch on that.
it beat it in .005 seconds, how about you man, how long did it take you to beat it?
Yes, imagine the amount of porn you could watch with a super computer....
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=supercomputer
For this...
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6421/inside-the-titan-supercomputer-299k-amd-x86-cores-and-186k-nvidia-gpu-cores/3
They went with AMD because at the time when "Jaguar" was in development, back in the good old K8 days, AMD had the superior architecture. So as the system evolves the choice to go with Opteron's simply stems from that time.
"If you're curious about why Titan uses Opterons, the explanation is actually pretty simple. Titan is a large installation of Cray XK7 cabinets, so CPU support is actually defined by Cray. Back in 2005 when Jaguar made its debut, AMD's Opterons were superior to the Intel Xeon alternative. The evolution of Cray's XT/XK lines simply stemmed from that point, with Opteron being the supported CPU of choice."
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6421/inside-the-titan-supercomputer-299k-amd-x86-cores-and-186k-nvidia-gpu-cores/2