Mid-2016 the news of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) preparing to take delivery of a new IBM supercomputer in early 2018 hit the online media. This new IBM system, named Summit, looks like USA’s response to China’s new Sunway TaihuLight system. Thus, the Department of Energy will have a 200 peak petaFLOPS (200 quadrillion floating-point operations per second) supercomputer, surpassing TaihuLight’s 124.5 pentaFLOPS in TOP500.
The same US Laboratory mentioned above hosts the Titan supercomputer, which became operational on October 29, 2012. Although Titan only has a fifth of the expected Summit’s computational power, it is an active functional super-computer system that is currently #3 on the TOP500 list, following TaihuLight and Tianhe-2, the Intel-based Chinese supercomputer that has been downgraded in June 2016 from its number one spot on the past six TOP500 lists.
Titan supercomputer – details and specifications
Located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee, US, the Titan supercomputer is considered the first CPUs (central processing unit) and GPUs (graphics processing unit) hybrid that performs over 10 petaFLOPS. Its presentation page mentions how “by pairing the CPUs and the GPU accelerators and maximizing the efficiency of applications to exploit their strengths, Titan will lead the way on the road to the exascale.”
The system operator (and manufacturer) is Cray Inc. headquartered in Seattle, Washington, whose founder has been working in the computing field since 1950 in Minnesota and Wisconsin ventures. Titan ranked first in the TOP500 when built, and went on to be the second most powerful supercomputer in 2013.
Characteristics of the Titan system:
- Joint employment of 18,688 AMD Opteron CPUs and an equal number of Nvidia Tesla GPUs (introducing a significant upgrade in comparison with the previous super system – Jaguar);
- A storage capacity of 40 PB and a 1.4 TB/s IO Lustre file system;
- The operating system is a Cray Linux Environment (also named UNICOS or CX-OS);
- The system uses 404 square meters (4,352 ft2) and reuses several Jaguar elements, such as the cooling systems and cabinets;
- It totalizes 299,008 processor cores, and a total of 693.6 TiB of CPU and GPU RAM;
- In order to able to function, Titan needs heat sinks air-cooling, with a cooling capacity of 23.2 MW (6600 tons), which brings water to a temperature of 5.5 °C (42 °F) that serves in maintaining the recirculated air at a proper level;
- The total memory is of 710,144 GB (710 terabytes); each of the 18,688 system compute nodes features a 32GB (DDR3) plus 6 GB memory;
- The necessary power for the system to run is of 8,209.00 kW (9 MW peak power consumption);
- The Linpack performance (Rmax) counts 17,590 TFlop/s, while the Theoretical Peak (Rpeak) is of 27,112.5 TFlop/s.
If curious to take a look inside Titan and the facility it resides in, check this AnandTech article.
What projects is Titan involved in?
In 2013 ExtremeTech reported that the requests for Titan’s supercomputing powers exceeded its available computing time. Due to this, ORNL pre-selected the requests and 31 winner projects were chosen. Strong remote connectivity allows most workload to be performed remotely.
An example of such projects that employ Titan’s powers would be one the X-Stack projects that developed their demos using the super system’s GPUs. X-Stack “supports research on significant advances in programming models, languages, compilers, runtime systems, and tools for extreme-scale computing” and the demos aimed at making DSLs “effective for exascale, enabling the support of both embedded and general DSLs and addressing all layers of the exascale software stack – software infrastructure for DSL design and implementation, domain-specific optimizing compilers, and runtime support.
In a different instance a multi-institution chemistry consortium team employed Titan to understand actinides, gaining access via DOE’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. What are actinides doing?! The answer is in a related Phys.org article.
Researchers from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) have also used the Titan supercomputer in perfecting detailed weather forecasting, considered essential for human endeavors, as well as serving in calamity prevention and taking the appropriate measures in advance, so that less persons would be taken by surprise when meteorological conditions suddenly change.
A 2015 source attempts to summarize the type of projects facilitated by Titan (and other future supercomputers) like this: “complex simulations that will aid scientific research and national security projects, along with weather modelling and medical applications”. Although it makes sense that extremely complex projects, simulations and software demos are hard to explain in layman’s words, it is however a bit disappointing to find it so hard to determine more clearly the nature of Titan’s applications.
However, the ambiguity of the activities enhanced by Titan (as much as it is justified by the intricate ways of complex modern sciences) does not serve in calming down the most fearful persons. Especially that some of the more concerned voices actually come from inside the tech world, as you may see here (CNN video material).
