Oak Ridge National Labs' super compuer Titan emerges world's fastest

Oak Ridge National Laboratory's (ORNL) massive new super computer Titan, has been ranked as the fastest computer in the world.

The list of the 500 fastest computers is published twice yearly by Jack Dongarra, distinguished professor in the department of electrical engineering and computer science and the director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Mannheim. This is the list's 20th anniversary.

Titan, which was publicly unveiled just two weeks ago, is a super-sized upgrade of ORNL's previous system - Jaguar. The upgrade makes Titan, a Cray XK7 system, 10 times more powerful than its predecessor.

Titan was benchmarked at 17.59 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second). It is followed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Sequoia supercomputer, which ran the benchmark at 16.3 petaflop/s.

The Kraken and Beacon, at the University of Tennessee (UT), were placed 25th and 253rd respectively. Both machines are managed by the university's National Institute for Computational Sciences.

UT professors and a variety of national and international research teams will use Titan's power to solve a wide range of important problems, from developing more comprehensive and exact climate predictions to designing new drugs. UT and ORNL, which currently share more than 50 appointments, five institutes, and several successful programs, have collaborated for more than fifty years to tackle such difficult research challenges.