Cray outlines plan for 20 petaflop 'Titan' supercomputer

High performance computing specialist Cray has revealed its plans for a supercomputer system which would operate at speeds as high as 20 petaflops.

The company said its XK6 supercomputer would power the planned 'Titan' system at Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Tennessee. The $97m cluster will top out at speeds of 10 to 20 petaflops and is expected to be used for calculating energy and environmental simulations and models.

The Oak Ridge system will be among the first to use Cray's XK6 system. First unveiled in June, the XK6 utilises a combination of AMD Opteron CPUs and Nvidia Tesla GPUs to improve multithreading and parallel computing performance. Cray eventually plans to use the platform to develop clusters running at up to 50 petaflops.

"Oak Ridge, the Department of Energy's Office of Science, and Cray have a history of accomplishing great things by continually pushing the boundaries of supercomputing," said Cray president and chief executive Peter Ungaro.

"Signing this contract is a significant milestone for our company and our partnership with Oak Ridge because the new system will enable even further amazing scientific achievements.

When completed, the Titan system will easily surpass current supercomputing benchmarks set by systems in Japan and China. Earlier this year, the Japanese K computing cluster claimed first billing in the Top500 supercomputer rankings with a top speed of 8.12 petaflops.

Currently, Oak Ridge houses the world's third most powerful computing cluster, the 1.8 petaflop Cray XT-5 'Jaguar' system. The company expects the Titan cluster to be fully operational by late 2012.