The power of Titan, a supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, is akin to each of the world's 7 billion people being able to carry out 3 million calculations per second.
In a breakthrough that harnesses video-game technology for solving science's most complex mysteries, a U.S. government laboratory today deployed Titan—the fastest, most powerful, and most energy-efficient of a new generation of supercomputers that breach the bounds of "central processing unit" computing.
The Titan system at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee is a leading contender to top the industry's official list of the world's fastest supercomputers, to be announced next month in Salt Lake City. It can handle 20,000 trillion calculations each second—a speed of 20 petaflops, which puts it neck-and-neck with the U.S. government computer in California that has led the closely watched TOP500 list since June.
It would take 60,000 years for 1,000 people working at a rate of one calculation per second to complete the number of calculations that Titan can process in a single second. Think of Titan's power as akin to each of the world's 7 billion people solving 3 million math problems per second.
But Titan's signature achievement is how little energy it burns while blazing through those computations.
Titan's predecessor supercomputer at Oak Ridge, the 2.3-petaflop Jaguar machine, drew 7 megawatts (MW) of electricity, enough to power a small town. Titan needs just about 30 percent more electricity, 9 MW, while delivering ninefold greater computing power.
"We're able to achieve an order of magnitude increase in our scientific computing capabilities, which is what we need for our challenges, but to do so at essentially the same energy budget," says Jack Wells, director of science at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. "Titan puts us on a different curve with respect to the energy consumption for increased computing power."
Video-Gaming Efficiency
Titan's energy-saving secret is a "hybrid" architecture that boosts the power of central processing units (CPUs) by marrying them to high-performance, energy-efficient graphical processing units (GPUs)—the technology that propels and animates today's most popular video games. A few dozen supercomputers around the world have used GPU and CPU processing in tandem since the first hybrid machine, the one-petaflop Roadrunner, at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico in 2008. Titan is the largest, by far.
To update pixels rapidly enough to bring angry birds, soldiers, and athletes to life on game consoles and handheld devices, GPUs have to handle large amounts of data at the same time, in parallel fashion. "This is exactly what we need for the future in order to enable progress and manage the energy [in supercomputing]," Wells says. If Titan had relied only on CPUs, which are optimized to do just one task at a time rapidly and flexibly (serial processing), Oak Ridge estimates the electricity requirements would have been about 30 MW, or more than three times greater than the system now demands.
Titan's approach is not the only path to energy-efficient supercomputing. IBM's "Sequoia" BlueGene/Q supercomputer at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California, the reigning leader of the official Top500 list, is part of a family of supercomputers that have been leaders in low-power design. The Sequoia can boast energy efficiency similar to Titan's (it uses 8 MW, and its peak performance is 20 petaflops computing power) through a design using many small, low-power embedded chips, connected through specialized networks inside the system. Four of the current top ten fastest supercomputers are BlueGene/Q machines, but the design does not use widely available commodity processors.
But Oak Ridge and its machine designer, Seattle-based Cray, have built Titan with processors made by the same companies that make the processors in consumer personal computing and gaming products. The upgrade from the Jaguar system to the Titan Cray XK7 system, which cost about $100 million, relies on AMD Opteron CPUs (299,008 CPU cores in all) and NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. It's an approach that has allowed Oak Ridge to take advantage of advances in the broader information technology market—including the highly efficient processing needed for video games—to drive energy efficiency.
"There's an economic model here that really enables this to work," says Steve Scott, chief technology officer for NVIDIA, based in Santa Clara, California. "The high-performance computing industry has great demand but it's not a very large market. But we're able to leverage this very broad consumer technology and use that to enable power-efficiency breakthroughs and make this high-performance computational tool possible. (See "Supercomputing Power Could Pave the Way to Energy-Efficient Engines")
"So when you go out and download and play the latest video game," Scott says, "you actually are helping to advance science."
From Motors to Skin
Because Titan marks an achievement in energy efficiency, it is perhaps appropriate that one of its primary uses will be to advance science on the future of energy. Titan will be put to work on research into systems for more fuel-efficient automobiles, for safer nuclear power reactors with improved power output, and on advanced magnets that could drive future electric motors and generators. It also will be used in research to model more accurately the impact of climate change.
These projects were among 61 science and engineering projects awarded time on Titan and another U.S. supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory outside of Chicago, the DOE announced today. Scientists in fields from molecular biology to materials science vie for time on the machine at Oak Ridge and other U.S. government facilities, in a competitive process in which projects are picked for "high potential for accelerating discovery and innovation." The deployment of Titan makes it the largest open science supercomputer in operation in the world today. (In contrast, Sequoia is dedicated to classified work on maintenance of the U.S. government's nuclear weapons stockpile.)
Courtesy:
NGC
