For most of us , a computer believably seems tight enough if it ’s able to run " LEGO Lord of the Rings " or a YouTube picture of an English bulldog on a skateboard without slacken to a Australian crawl . But for scientists who need to do work on really complicated problems , the bare 158 billion calculations per second that a personal computer with an i7 processor can do is n’t nearly enough [ generator : Peckham , ORNL , Kolawole ] .
That ’s why research worker are so worked up about the Tennessee - establish Oak Ridge National Laboratory ( ORNL ) ’s Modern toy , the Cray Titan supercomputer . When it was unveiled in October 2012 , the Titan claimed the deed of conveyance of world ’s debauched computer , which had been held by the IBM Sequoia Blue Gene / Q machine at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California for just six months [ sources : Burt , Johnston ] .
How fast is the Titan ? Its theoretic top focal ratio is 27 petaflops , which does n’t sound that impressive unless you know that it signify 27,000 trillion computation per 2d [ source : ORNL ] . That ’s hundreds of thousands times faster than your top - of - the - line PC . Unlike your PC , though , Titan wo n’t conform to on a screen background ; it engage a space the size of a basketball Margaret Court [ source : Kolawole ] .
Titan ’s unbelievable stop number makes it a fantastic tool for tackling really complicated problems that involve gigantic amounts of data . Researchers plan to use it to scarper detailed simulations of the Earth ’s clime , which may pay melodic theme on how to lessen spheric warming . They also may habituate it to aid plan A-one - effective internal combustion engines and solar panels , and to run away biological feigning that will help pelt along the testing of new drug . On the pure skill level , Titan could help scientist copy the breaking of the Bond that hold molecules together , reach them new penetration into one of the most authoritative operation in nature [ sources : ORNL , Kolawole ] .
But the Titan is important not just because it ’s incredibly tight , but because it pioneer a new sort of supercomputer pattern that could engender a generation of even speedy machines . For years , scientists have achieved higher and gamy speeding simply by building machines with K and grand of key processing units , or processor , in them , and then break the calculations they desire to do into modest piece that could be parcel out to all of those mainframe [ source : ORNL ] . The drawback of that approach is all those CPU chips involve enormous amounts of electricity . The Titan , however , pairs each of its 18,688 CPU with a graphic processing social unit , or GPU — the kind of chip used in hot - retinal rod gambling PCs — to quicken the computing . GPUs do n’t take in as much succus as mainframe , so the result is a machine that ’s fast than its precursor but also a stack more energy efficient [ source : ORNL , Kolawole ] .
Researchers see the Titan as blaze the room towardexascale - class computers — that is , machine a thousand or more clip as fast as the most powerful supercomputers today [ sources : Kolawole , Goodwin and Zacharia ] .
Frequently Answered Questions
Lots More Information
I grew up in the sixties , back when a computer was something that engage up an entire room , and data point was stored on punch cards that carried the impress warning " do not fold , spindle or mutilate . " And you really could n’t do that much with them , either . So it ’s been nothing short of amazing to find out the advance of computing power and capabilities during my life .
The first desktop microcomputer that I buy in 1988 was about 10 times as fast as the onboard computer that the Apollo 11 astronauts used on the way to the Moon in 1969 . And today , the iPhone that I bear in my pouch is vastly more powerful than either of them .
