Is the new supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Labs the most
powerful machine on Earth? It might be. But we won't know for a
few more weeks. Uncloaked on 29 October by Oak Ridge -- a
Tennessee lab run by the US Department of Energy -- the Titan
supercomputer is a Cray machine made of nearly 19,000 processing
units stitched together with 710 terabytes of It can perform 20
thousand trillion calculations per second, or 20 petaflops.
That's enough to put it on top of the world, for the moment at
least. The world's second-most-powerful supercomputer is
Sequoia, an IBM system at Lawrence Livermore National Labs. It's
been benchmarked at just over 16 petaflops. But the good people
who keep tabs on these things are cooking up a new list of the
world's top supercomputers, and it's not clear who's going to
end up on top. That semi-annual list is set to be published
around 11 November, just ahead of a big supercomputing
conference in Salt Lake City. Titan is a technically interesting
machine. It's part of a new trend to