Titan is world’s most powerful supercomputer

There is a certain prestige for a country to more or less “own” the world’s most powerful supercomputer, and the Department of Energy (DOE) has announced that they have just turned on such a behemoth, calling it the Titan. At the DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory facility, its latest Titan system has gone live, where it is capable of performing a whopping 20,000 trillion calculations a second, hitting the 20 petaflops mark – which is actually 10 times more powerful compared to the laboratory’s Jaguar supercomputer, once billed as the world’s most powerful supercomputer, lying in sixth place today.

Chances are pretty good that with such performance, the Titan will knock DOE’s Sequoia supercomputer that is based on an IBM design off its perch as the current world record holder. According to James Hack, direction of ORNL’s computational sciences center, the Titan will enable scientists simulate physical systems in a far more realistic manner, not to mention in greater detail. Too bad it cannot simulate a model to stop hurricanes from happening though.