Titan Tops TOP500 List

The newly upgraded Titan supercomputer has replaced Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Sequoia system at the No. 1 spot on the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers. 

According to the most recent edition of the TOP500 list, Titan achieved 17.59 PFLOPS (quadrillions of calculations per second) on the Linpack benchmark. Titan is a Cray XK7 system installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and it features 560,640 processors, including 261,632 NVidia K20x accelerator cores.

Sequoia, an IBM BlueGene/Q system, now occupies the No. 2 spot on the list, with 16.32 PFLOPS on the Linpack benchmark. Fujitsu’s K computer installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Japan is in third place. Mira, a BlueGene/Q system installed at Argonne National Laboratory occupies the No. 4 spot. And, at No. 5, is JUQUEEN, a BlueGene/Q system at the Forschungszentrum Juelich in Germany. According to the list, JUQUEEN is now the most powerful system in Europe.

The TOP500 list also provides insight into which technologies are leading the way in the world of supercomputing. According to the website, systems with multi-core processors dominate the list, with 84.6 percent using processors with six or more cores and 46.2 percent using eight or more cores. InfiniBand technology now provides interconnects on 226 systems out of the total 500 – up from 209 on the previous list. And, Gigabit Ethernet interconnects are found on 188 systems – down from 207 previously.

The TOP500 list is compiled twice a year by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. You can read more details at: http://www.top500.org/.