Titan Supercomputer to Feature Fastest Storage on the Planet at 1.4TB/s

I have to start out this article with a giant wow attached to it, as the news about the world’s fastest computer is nothing short of that. The computer dubbed “The Titan” supercomputer over at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has already attained the status and the honor of being the world’s most powerful supercomputer, but like all things of power, more is always better. With that said it seems the Titan, which BTW has no relationship to NVIDIA’s latest VGA weapon is setting its sights to attain more power and now wants to wear the mantle of having the fastest storage as well as they beef up what is already the beefiest.

So what have the folks over at Oak Ridge doing this time? Well the Titan as it was came loaded 18,688 AMD Opteron 6274 16-core CPUs, and 18,688 Nvidia Tesla K20X GPUs. If you’re counting, this makes Titan a 299,008-core computer. It sports 710TB of memory, with a split of 598TB dedicated to the CPUs and 112TB to the GPUs. Before this new goal of upgrading Titan’s storage, it had 10 petabytes of storage, running at 240GB/sec. The rig can perform around 27 petaflops, and the entire unit cost $97 million dollars, which is pocket change for the rich right ☺. So what are they doing to up the ante? The people at Oak Ridge have decided that they wanted to step up the systems storage capabilities by adding a new file system that that has 40PB of storage. Instead of just upgrading the space the new file system will allow Titan to reach performance speeds of 1.4TB/s.

DadatDirect Networks will build this new system according to the Oak Ridge boys, as the company will use DDN “s SFA12K-40 storage systems to build this new beast called the Spider II. According to the Oak Ridges press release they are claiming that the storage is so enormous that it is the equivalent of 227,000 miles of stacked books or in a quirkier measurement the same distance from the Oak Ridge facility in Tennessee to the moon. The new Spider II supercomputer will be comprised of 36 of the aforementioned SFA12K-40 systems with each one containing around 1.12PB (Petra bytes) of storage capacity. This is one incredible project that will be a really cool thing when it is finished as it is going places no PC has gone before and that in itself is news worthy of coverage. I am contacting the company about doing a walkthrough and factory tour as well as a close up of the actual system itself. So what do you thing, really cool news or just something to talk about at the water cooler? Also do you think the name Titan should be something else? If you do let me hear your thoughts and opinions in the comments section below where your interaction is highly encouraged. Thanks for reading Tech OF Tomorrow.

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