The U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in
Tennessee has turned on a new supercomputer called Titan that
could be the world's fastest. It's capable of 20 petaflops,
which is 20,000 trillion calculations per second.
Computerworld's Agam Shah noted, "The supercomputer is more than
10 times faster than its predecessor called Jaguar, which was
deployed in 2009 and was considered the world's fastest
supercomputer in June 2010 until it was dethroned a few months
later by a Chinese supercomputer called Tianhe-1A at the
National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin. Titan's deployment
comes just a few weeks ahead of the release of the Top500, which
lists the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world. The fastest
supercomputer in the Top500 list released in June this year was
Sequoia, an IBM BlueGene/Q system deployed by the U.S. DOE at
the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore,
California." In National Geographic, Marianne Lavelle wrote, "It
would take 60,000 years for 1,000 people workin