17-Petaflop Titan Supercomputer Is Now Officially The World's Fastest
Meet Titan NVIDIAAmerican supercomputers now make up half of the top ten fastest machines on the planet. The latest TOP500 rankings of the world's fastest supercomputers is out today, and as expected Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Titan has unseated Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Sequoia in for the number one seat. That means a couple of things. For one, it represents something of a proving out for co-processor technology (that's technology that uses graphics processors alongside conventional processors to accelerate a machine's performance), which drove Titan's performance over the top. Secondly, it means it's been a really good year for American supercomputing. Titan is the successor to ORNL's Jaguar supercomputer (actually, it's really an upgrade of Jaguar), which itself sat atop the TOP500 rankings a few years ago. Since then, computers in China, Japan, and elsewhere have really given the U.S. a serious run for its money, unseating Jaguar for the number...