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Titan Supercomputer: The building of a speed machine

ORNL Although the machine is now complete, it will only begin to be used to its full potential in in early 2013. (Copyright: ORNL)ORNL
Although the machine is now complete, it will only begin to be used to its full potential in in early 2013. (Copyright: ORNL)

What is expected to become the world’s fastest supercomputer has been completed.

Titan, owned and operated by the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is theoretically capable of  20 petaflops – or more than 20,000 trillion calculations every second.

The current fastest civilian supercomputer is an IBM machine called Sequoia, at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is capable of 16.32 petaflops.

Titan is an upgrade of the Oak Ridge lab’s existing supercomputer Jaguar, has been in development for the last three years.

Read more about the machine in our in-depth feature here.

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