OAK RIDGE, Tenn. (AP) — A new supercomputer is ready to go to work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The Department of Energy facility announced Monday that its new Titan system can handle 20,000 trillion calculations a second, which in computing language is referred to as 20 petaflops. ORNL says that makes Titan 10 times more powerful than the laboratory’s Jaguar supercomputer.
Titan gets its speed from a family of processors called graphic processing units, which were first developed for computer gaming, combined with traditional central processing units.
The supercomputer will support research in energy, climate change, efficient engines and materials science.
James Hack, direction of ORNL’s computational sciences center, said Titan will let scientists simulate physical systems more realistically and in greater detail.
