14500+ NVIDIA Kepler Flagship GK110 GPUs to Go Into Titan Supercomputer!

NVIDIA’s “Daddy Kepler”, the unreleased flagship GPU in its Kepler range is to go into a supercomputer currently under construction at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

The ORNL is currently building the “Titan” supercomputer, which is actually a segment of the former Cray “Jaguar” supercomputer. This segment is currently being transformed into a number crunching monster capable of 20 petaflop performance, possibly gaining the crown of fastest supercomputer once it’s officially benchmarked and listed in the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers. The deadline of inclusion is November, but it’s not clear at this point whether that will be met, since it still needs to be built and tested.

What’s really interesting about this, is that the raw power for this supercomputer will be provided by 14,592 K20 HPC cards, featuring NVIDIA’s flagship GK110 GPU (a standard GTX 680 graphics card has the cut down GK104). The computer will end up being put into competition with other similar supercomputers to provide heavy duty computational capability for scientists and anyone else who needs that kind of power. The project is headed up by Jeff Nichols, who said that the computer should be ready for users in March 2013, “Our DOE target date for the Keplers being available to our users is March 2013. We will change the name (from Jaguar to Titan) once we have gotten through acceptance (most likely sometime between December 2012 and March, 2013”.

There is more information on this story at the Knoxville News Sentinel and the link below. We also have more information on the powerful GK110 GPU here and here.