The Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory already features a mind boggling 18,688 AMD Opteron 6274 16-core CPUs, 18,688 Nvidia Tesla K20X GPUs and 710 TB of memory that have granted it the distinction of being the world’s most powerful supercomputer.
Now, for additional bragging rights, or more likely due to the fact that the Titan still can’t meet the demands on its computing time, the supercomputer’s current 10 PB of storage and 240 GB/s peak transfer speed is being upgraded to DataDirect Network’s Spider II storage system. It offers a phenomenal peak transfer speed of 1.4 TB/s and 40 PB of storage that will give the Titan the additional distinction of having the world’s fastest storage system.
For a sense of just how vast the offerings of this $97 million upgrade actually is, the Titan is reportedly able to store the equivalent of 365,000 km of stacked books (the distance from here to the Moon) or, alternatively, is likely capable of loading your entire video library in less time than it takes you to click on your “My Videos” folder.