Titan - The Fastest Supercomputer in the World

Posted by on December 20, 2012

The official list of the world's top 500 supercomputers was released, once again crowning a U.S.-based installation as the world's fastest. Titan beat the previous supercomputer, the IBM Sequoia, in November.

Sequoia clocks in at around 16.32 petaflops per second. Titan clocks a 17.59 petaflops per second. Titan uses only 560,640 processors, which is actually less than the 1,572,864 cores that powers Sequoia.

Titan was turned on this past October at the US Deptartment of Energy's Oak Ridge Lab in Tennessee.

Coming in the third spot on the Top 500 list is the Fujitsu-built RIKEN supercomputer with 705,024 cores and 10.51 petaflops.Machines from IBM hold down the fourth and fifth spots, with the Mira 8.16 Petflop machine at the Argonne National Lab in the U.S. and the 4.14 Petaflop JUQUEEN machine in Germany.

The Top 500 Supercomputer list also confirms the dominance of Linux in the HPC space. 469 out of 500 machines on the list are currently powered by Linux.