Oak Ridge Laboratory Turns "Jaguar" Supercomputer Into A "Titan" With Help From Nvidia GPUs

Posted 10/11/2011 at 10:10am | by Brad Chacos

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John Carmack may not want anything to do with Nvidia after the whole Rage debacle, but the driver issues that caused the programmer to call the game’s PC launch “a clusterf*ck” don’t bother governments nearly as much. Last year, China stuffed a bunch of Nvidia’s GPU’s into its Tianhe-1A supercomputer to make it the second fastest supercomputer in the world. That bumped the Cray-built Jaguar rig out at Oak Ridge National Laboratory down to the third slot. Now, the US Department of Energy’s looking to return the favor by – you guessed it – shoving a bunch of Nvidia GPUs into Jaguar to boost its performance and create a “Titan.”

That’s what the supercomputer will be called after the Jaguar GPU upgrade is complete, you see. The first phase of the roll-out is already underway, CNET reports. According to the publication, 960 – count ‘em, 960 – Nvidia Tesla M2090 GPUs are currently being installed into Jaguar to compliment the multi-core CPUs already found inside of it -- and turn the system into "Titan." When Nvidia’s “Kepler”-based processors hit the streets sometime next year, the DOE hopes to slap another 18,000 Kepler-rocking Tesla GPUs into Titan to raise is petaflop-pumping performance even more.

The Register reports that the plan is to remove the 18,688 two-socket nodes currently found in Jaguar – each node of which contains an Opteron processor – and replace them with 4,672 four-socket blade servers based on Cray’s X6 design.  In the X6 design, one of the Opteron sockets on the blade server is replaced by four of the Nvidia GPUs.

All told, the machine should contain 299,008 Opteron cores and 18,688 Nvidia GPUs for a possbile output of over 20 petaflops. Theoretically, it will offer twice the performance of the current supercomputer king – Japan’s K computer – at a third of the energy costs.