Titan Tops Top500 List in Latest Supercomputer Rankings

By Kevin Davies  

November 12, 2012 | The new Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has claimed the top slot at the first attempt in the latest Top500 world supercomputing rankings published today.  

Titan knocks off the previous record holder, the Sequoia system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. 

As described in some detail in this recent Bio-IT World story, Titan has replaced Jaguar as an “open science” supercomputer at ORNL. The computer features the latest technology from Cray and NVIDIA. 

Titan set a performance record of 17.59 petaflops as measured by the traditional LINPACK benchmark. In addition, the contribution of more than 16,000 NVIDIA Tesla K20X accelerators helped Titan reach a performance of 2,142.77 megaflops/watt, surpassing the energy efficiency of the top-ranked system according to the Green500 list of supercomputers. 

NVIDIA says that 90 percent of Titan’s record-breaking performance was accounted for by its K20X GPU (graphics processing unit) accelerators.