World's Most Powerful Supercomputer - ORNL Titan
Titan, the world's most powerful supercomputer was introduced by the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). It is cooled by water circuits going round, almost the size of a basketball court and with power which can run a small town. With this mechanism Titan is capable of 20 petaflops or 20,000 trillion calculations per second. Due to this, Titan has become almost 10 times more efficient than ORNL's previous supercomputer, called Jaguar.
It is almost 20 trillion times more powerful than an average PC. In future, we can expect more powerful supercomputers than Titan itself. It has 18,688 nodes, 16-core AMD Opteron 6274 processor and an NVIDIA Tesla K20 graphics processing unit (GPU) accelerator and a memory of 700 terabytes. All this might be understandable for a science or a computer geek, but a lay person, it just means that a supercomputer has been made with a capability more than is required by this world. Supercomputers also take a lot of energy and consume enormous power.
However, Titan uses both GPUs and CPUs in a single system which reduces its carbon footprints and requires less power. With the help of this supercomputer, scientists will be able to undertake research projects in energy, climate change, materials and other scientific innovations with the use of the computer power.
A supercomputer is essential for highly detailed simulations which scientists require and want it done in a quicker time. Experts believe that GPU technology will be introduced in consumer graphic cards in the near future. With the huge climate changes and climate related disasters occurring more, like the recent Hurricane Sandy in the U.S., scientists need supercomputer to help mankind.