The Oak Ridge National Laboratory will use Nvidia processors to build one of the world’s fastest supercomputers for its Department of Energy (DOE) facility.
Oak Ridge already is at work on the first phase of the so-called “Titan” supercomputer, a Cray XK6 machine that will upgrade its existing Jaguar supercomputer with 960 Tesla M2090 GPUs from Nvidia, according to the processor vendor. The GPUs are based on Nvidia’s current chip architecture, Fermi. Titan potentially will deliver 20 petaflops of performance at its peak,
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, in a statement.
here is an article listing the goals for building this supercomputer
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-petaflops-supercomputer-oak-ridge-facility.html
here is an excerpt for the lazy:
Supercomputers achieve their ability to process enormous amounts of data in very short amounts of time by in essence, hooking together a lot of processing boxes and then using a device to connect them all together, this is why the Gemini XE interconnect is so important; it’s actually one of only two new pieces of proprietary hardware that will be added to create the new machine; the other is the Graphics Display Unit (GDU) co-processor (likely provided by Nvidia) that will help to perform calculations more quickly. This is also why computer scientists are so easily able to choose ahead of time just how fast a new computer will be; the more processor boxes you add, the faster the end result, so long as you have an interconnect that can handle them. The Titan will also use what is being described as “globally addressable memory,” which means data won’t have to slow down as it passes through I/O channels.
The Titan is expected to be used by the DOE to calculate complex energy systems and will cost the government somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million dollars.
here is another article stating that the supercomputer “titan” will use opteron as well as nvidia processors
and here is an interesting roadmap image i found showing the timeline for the supercomputer projects they are working on:
