Oak Ridge lab: Behold, I Am TITAN, hear my 20 petaflop ROAR Oak Ridge National Laboratories is really eager to talk about the "Titan" supercomputer, which weighs in at more than 20 petaflops of performance and which has just been activated this month. In fact it's too eager to wait until the SC12 supercomputing trade show in November to give out all the feeds and speeds. Cray and Nvidia …
Fujitsu/RIKEN's K computer has 700,000 SPARC cores. The comparison (setting aside the GPU part of Titan) is quite interesting:
K: ~700,000 cores, ~10 petaflops
Titan: ~300,000 cores, ~3 peteflops.
So K's SPARC cores are doing rather better than Titan's Opteron cores. Which suggests that a hypothetical SPARC/GPU hybrid would be quite an impressive machine!
It's also interesting to note that the GPU element of a Titan node delivers about 8 times the performance of a K SPARC node and about 9 times the performance of the Opeteron part of a Titan node. Somehow factors of 8, 9ish feel a little disappointing; GPUs are massively parallel internally (hundreds of cores) but it's not adding up to hundreds or even tens times quicker than a CPU. Still, the Titan is a truly impressive bit of kit.
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