Titan supercomputer: 38,400-processor, 20-petaflop successor to Jaguar

Cray, AMD, Nvidia, and the Department of Energy have announced that the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL) Jaguar supercomputer will soon be upgraded to yet again become the fastest HPC installation in the world. The new, mighty-morphing computer will feature thousands of Cray XK6 blades, each one accommodating up to four 16-core AMD Opteron 6200 (Interlagos) chips and four Nvidia Tesla 20-series GPGPU coprocessors. The Jaguar name will be suitably inflated, too: the new behemoth will be called Titan.

Now, the exact specs of Titan haven’t been revealed, but the Jaguar supercomputercurrently sports 200 cabinets of Cray XT5 blades — and each cabinet, in theory, can be upgraded to hold 24 XK6 blades. That’s a total of 4,800 servers, or 38,400 processors in total; 19,200 Opterons 6200s, and 19,200 Tesla GPUs. If you want to look at that in terms of cores, that’s 307,200 CPU cores — and with 512 shaders in each Tesla chip… that’s 9,830,400 compute units. In other words, Titan should be capable of massive parallelism of more than one million concurrent operations.

With 200 cabinets, Titan would be capable of around 16 petaflops — 16 thousand trillion mathematical operations per second — but the press release being bandied around suggests that its peak performance will up to 20 petaflops, so perhaps more than 200 cabinets are being used. Cray’s Gemini interconnect is capable of wiring together 300 cabinets, which would result in a peak performance of around 24 petaflops.

Jaguar, as it stands, is capable of 1.75 petaflops, and the world’s fastest supercomputer —“K,” based at the RIKEN research institute in Japan — clocks in at 8 petaflops. Titan, then, should put the US firmly back in the lead. The upgrade is expected to cost $97 million, with the bulk of the XK6 blades being installed before the end of 2011, though only some of them will contain Tesla GPGPUs. Then, when the next-generation Tesla (Kepler) chips are available, Titan will receive a second round of upgrades, bringing the total number of Nvidia chips up to 18,000.

As for what Titan will be used for, it’s hard to say. Titan, like Jaguar, will be a public-access computer, meaning all of its resources will be made available to the scientific community. Weather modeling, fusion/fission reaction modeling, cancer and AIDS research — Titan will hopefully help with just about every scientific endeavor. You can log into Jaguar right now, incidentally — if you feel like doing some tera-scale research…

Titan supercomputer: 38,400-processor, 20-petaflop successor to Jaguar