Oak Ridge Today

Titan repairs complete, ORNL preparing for second round of supercomputer testing

Posted at
By 1 Comment

Jeff Nichols and Titan at ORNL

Jeff Nichols, associate director for computing and computational sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in front of Titan, the world’s fastest supercomputer. (Photos courtesy of ORNL)

Connectors in the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have been repaired, and workers are preparing the world’s fastest machine for a second round of acceptance testing, an official said Monday.

That testing could allow the $100 million machine to be put into full production mode by the end of this month or early May, said Jeff Nichols, ORNL associate lab director for computing and computational sciences.

Titan won’t be available to researchers for a short period while the lab re-runs acceptance tests. [Read more…]

Cray re-soldering Titan’s connectors, supercomputer testing could be done in April

Posted at
By 11 Comments

Jeff Nichols and Titan at ORNL

Jeff Nichols, associate director for computing and computational sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in front of Titan, the world’s fastest supercomputer. (Photos courtesy of ORNL)

Hundreds of connectors are being re-soldered each week, and the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory—the world’s fastest machine—could be in regular production by May, a lab official said Wednesday.

Jeff Nichols, ORNL associate lab director for computing and computational sciences, said connectors on the $100 million computer’s motherboards had too much gold, and solder was interacting with the gold on connector pins, making the solder unstable and leading to cracks.

There are about 20,000 of the pencil-sized connectors, which link central and graphic processing units, or CPUs and GPUs. Each connector has about 100 pins.

[Read more…]