U.S. Titan supercomputer named world's fastest

U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu announced Monday that Titan, a new supercomputer located at the Department's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been named the world's most powerful, according to the TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers.

Ten times more powerful than its predecessor, the Jaguar system, Titan will provide unprecedented power to accelerate scientific discoveries using technologies first developed for video game systems like Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It achieved 17.59 Petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second) on the Linpack benchmark test -- the specific application that is used to rank supercomputers on the Top500 list.

"The nation that leads the world in high-performance computing will have an enormous competitive advantage across a broad range of sectors, including national defense, science and medicine, energy production ..." said Chu in a statement. "Titan joins the Department's top-ranking supercomputers in equipping our nation's researchers with the tools needed to keep the United States on the cutting edge of innovation."

The Department now has five systems out of the fastest 20 in the world, with Sequoia at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in second place; Mira at Argonne National Laboratory in fourth place; Cielo, operated jointly by Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories, ranked 18th; and Hopper at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ranked 19th.