Oak Ridge National Lab Feeds Nvidia Tesla Chips to Jaguar Supercomputer, Turns it into a Titan

How do you turn a Jaguar into a Titan? It's simple really -- just change its diet to include plenty of Tesla chips. That's what the Oak Ridge National Laboratory plans to do as it upgrades its Jaguar supercomputer with no less than 960 Tesla M2090 GPUs based on Nvidia's Fermi architecture, followed by a second upgrade that will include 18,000 Tesla GPUs based on Nvidia's Kepler architecture. After the upgrade effort is complete, the new Titan supercomputer will have the potential to deliver over 20 petaflops of peak performance. A Titan indeed.

"All areas of science can benefit from this substantial increase in computing power, opening the doors for new discoveries that so far have been out of reach," said Jeff Nichols, associate laboratory director for Computing and Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. "Titan will be used for a variety of important research projects, including the development of more commercially viable biofuels, cleaner burning engines, safer nuclear energy, and more efficient solar power."


The upgraded Titan will rank as the fastest supercomputer in the world, supplanting Japan's 8.2 petaflop K machine as the fastest around. In addition to being two times as fast, Titan will also be three times more energy efficient than the K computer, Nvidia says.