Cray announced plans Tuesday to deploy a new supercomputer dubbed Titan for Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tenn. that could be twice as fast and three times as energy efficient as the current No. 1 supercomputer in the world, Japan's K computer.
The Titan system is projected to have a peak performance between 10 and 20 petaflops of high performance computing (HPC) power, according to Cray. Japan's K computer, named the top supercomputer in the world in June, has achieved a peak performance of 8.774 petaflops, or 8.774 quadrillion mathematical calculations per second.
Titan will be built in two phases by Cray for ORNL that are expected to be completed in the second half of 2012, with options available for additional upgrades after that, Cray said in a statement. The new supercomputer is actually a phased upgrade of ORNL's current Jaguar supercomputer.
The first phase involves replacing Jaguar's Cray XT5 compute blades with the supercomputer maker's new Cray XK6 blades featuring Advanced Micro Device's next-generation Opteron central processors code named Interlagos, Nvidia's Tesla M2090 graphics processors, and Cray's own Gemini interconnect. That phase of the Titan project is already underway and expected to be completed by the end of 2011, according to Cray.
The second phase of the project will be started in 2012 and includes the deployment of 18,000 next-generation Tesla GPUs based on Nvidia's upcoming architecture code named Kepler.
"All areas of science can benefit from this substantial increase in computing power, opening the doors for new discoveries that so far have been out of reach," said Jeff Nichols, associate laboratory director for Computing and Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. "Titan will be used for a variety of important research projects, including the development of more commercially viable biofuels, cleaner burning engines, safer nuclear energy, and more efficient solar power."
Titan Worth Nearly $100 Million
Cray said the multi-year, multi-phase contract to build Titan is valued at more than $97 million, with the first phase alone expected to generate more than $60 million in product revenue. In its statement, the company said delays in shipments of AMD's Interlagos chips had not affected Cray's target of completing the first phase of the project before the end of the year.
"Oak Ridge, the Department of Energy's Office of Science, and Cray have a history of accomplishing great things by continually pushing the boundaries of supercomputing," said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. "Signing this contract is a significant milestone for our company and our partnership with Oak Ridge because the new system will enable even further amazing scientific achievements.
"When we announced the Cray XK6 a few months ago, we said it had an architecture capable of scaling to more than 50 petaflops, and Titan will be a major step toward achieving that goal."
Currently, ORNL's Jaguar is the third most powerful supercomputer on the Top 500 list behind the K computer and China's Tianhe-1A, with a peak performance of 2.331 petaflops. Jaguar's current LINPACK benchmark score is 1.759 petaflops, as compared with the K computer's record-setting 8.162-petaflop performance in that measurement of a system's floating point computing power.
"Oak Ridge's decision to base Titan on Tesla GPUs underscores the growing belief that GPU-based heterogeneous computing is the best approach to reach exascale computing levels within the next decade," said Steve Scott, chief technology officer of Tesla products at Nvidia.
Exascale computing, measured in exaflops as opposed to petaflops, would represent a thousandfold increase in computing capabilities over the current generation of petascale supercomputers. Intel has stated that it believes the first exaflop-scale supercomputer will arrive by 2018.
One way Nvidia and others believe we'll arrive at such mind-boggling performance levels is by linking the particular strengths of linear-based instruction-set architectures like x86 with the ability of graphics processors like Tesla to perform multiple operations in parallel.
"The Tesla GPUs will provide over 85 percent of the peak performance of Titan," Scott said. "You simply can't get this level of performance in a power- and cost-efficient way with CPUs alone."
Jaguar is based on AMD's 2.6GHz, six-core Opteron CPUs, while Titan will incorporate x86-based Opteron chips with up to 16 cores and add parallel processing muscle courtesy of Nvidia's Tesla GPUs to push the limits of what's possible with today's supercomputers.
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