| starlight | Date: Tuesday, 30-October-2012, 2:48 PM | Message # 1 |
-- dragon lord--
Group: untoten mage
Messages: 1396
Status: Offline
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The sound of 20 quadrillion calculations happening every second is dangerously loud. Anyone spending more than 15 minutes in the same room with the Titan supercomputer must wear earplugs or risk permanent hearing damage. The din in the room will not come from the computer's 40,000 whirring processors, but from the fans and water pipes cooling them. If the dull roar surrounding Titan were to fall silent, those tens of thousands of processors doing those thousands of trillions of calculations would melt right down into their racks.
Titan is expected to become the world's most powerful supercomputer when it comes fully online at the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory, near Tennessee, in late 2012 or early 2013. But on this afternoon in mid-October, Titan isn't technically Titan yet. It's still a less-powerful supercomputer called Jaguar, which the US Department of Energy (DoE) has operated and continuously upgraded since 2005. Supercomputing power is measured in Flops (floating point operations per second), and Jaguar was the first civilian supercomputer to break the "petaflop barrier" of one quadrillion operations per second (a quadrillion is a one followed by 15 zeroes). In June 2010 it was the fastest supercomputer on Earth.
Read more/Full article/source - http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20121026-a-supercomputing-titan
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