The Jaguar has Received an upgrade, say hello to Titan!

A breakthrough in computer technology reveals that the supercomputer, parked up in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee the Jaguar, has received a new upgrade and with the Jaguar transforming into the Titan, and its definitely not to be underestimated.

Unleash the Power! 

Think of it as an opponent on Call of Duty, or the car racing past you in Need for Speed. However the opponent has got 50 arms, all with RPG's staring at you in the face. Or on Need for Speed, the car has got 5 jet engines attached to the back, perhaps it even has fold-able wings to fly over the city into the horizon into the next Need for Speed city! That would only be the start of the amount of power this supercomputer has really got.

According to the Linpack benchmark it operates at 17.59 petaflop/sec - the equivalent of 17,590 trillion calculations per second.

Linking in with the quote above, this supercomputer uses a mixture of both CPU's (Central Processing Unit) and GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) to obtain its immense power. With regards to the GPU's, it has been fitted with 18,688 Nvidia Tesla K20x units to work with the co-existing CPUs.

CPU's are designed to carry out one instruction at time compared to GPU's which carry out more than one instruction at any one time but are slightly slower. But their recordings show that the GPU's actually deal with 90% of the workload, enabling the CPU's to perform other tasks.

Unimaginable Uses

You'd think that it was made for gaming, to become the best player in the world but you'd be thinking in the wrong direction. The main use for Titan is research. The research into new technologies, like car engines, research biofuels and it can even simulate weather and climate change! The most stunning use is the medical research. It is able to dive into the smallest molecules, and it is able to test new medicines by using simulations. So it can see what would happen to our bodies if new medicines were tested, and it can also see the effects of the medicine down to the molecule, and also being able to see the side effects, the possibilities for this computer are endless!

And the last comment I would like to make is that think about it, with the rate at which technology is currently developing, it could be possible to harness the power of the Titan into the size of the laptop or mobile phone.