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Titan, once the world’s fastest computer, will be retired Aug. 1

Posted at 7:20 pm July 8, 2019
By John Huotari Leave a Comment

The Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory debuted as the fastest computer in the world in 2012, and it remained in the top 10 for seven years, providing billions of core hours of total computing time to researchers from around the world. The system will be decommissioned on Aug. 1, 2019, and its data center space will be retrofitted for a new supercomputer, Frontier. (Photo by ORNL)

A supercomputer that was once the world’s fastest will be retired at Oak Ridge National Laboratory on August 1.

The supercomputer is a Cray XK7 machine called Titan. It is operated by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. It’s a petaflop system capable of performing up to 27 quadrillion calculations per second.

Titan was the world’s fastest supercomputer in November 2012, but it was bumped to number two by Tianhe-2, a Chinese supercomputer in June 2013. Still, Titan continued to rank as one of the world’s top 10 fastest supercomputers from its debut at number one in 2012 until this June, when it dropped to number 12.

In June, ORNL said Titan, which has been operating for seven years, will be decommissioned on August 1 and disassembled for recycling. Titan will be removed to make room for a new, much more powerful supercomputer, Frontier. That will be an exascale system capable of 1.5 exaflops, or 1.5 quintillion calculations per second (a billion billion calculations per second). Frontier will be a $600 million Cray computer that is expected to be the world’s most powerful when it debuts in 2021.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Front Page News, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, ORNL, Slider, Top Stories, U.S. Department of Energy Tagged With: Buddy Bland, Cray, decommissioning, Frontier, IBM, Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, OLCF, ORNL, Stephen McNally, summit, supercomputer, Thomas Zacharia, Titan

Seven ORNL researchers named 2019 INCITE award winners

Posted at 1:01 pm November 21, 2018
By John Huotari Leave a Comment

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Jeremy Smith is studying the recalcitrance of biomass to enable cheaper, more efficient biofuels, and other high-value chemicals. (Image courtesy ORNL)

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Jeremy Smith is studying the recalcitrance of biomass to enable cheaper, more efficient biofuels, and other high-value chemicals. (Image courtesy ORNL)

 

Seven researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have been chosen by the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment, also known as INCITE, program to lead scientific investigations that require the nation’s most powerful computers, a press release said.

INCITE awards computing time via a proposal process to researchers seeking to harness the power of DOE computing systems at the Argonne and Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facilities to solve some of the world’s greatest scientific challenges, the press release said.

Since INCITE’s inception in 2004, the ALCF and OLCF have continuously undergone significant upgrades to retain their edge in facilitating the most computationally demanding scientific projects. The ALCF’s most recent machine is Theta, an 11.69-petaflop Cray XC40 system whose 280,000-plus cores make it ideal for research at the nexus of simulation, data science, and machine learning. An even more powerful system, the exascale Aurora, is planned for deployment in 2021 and is projected to be capable of a quintillion (one billion billion) calculations per second. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Front Page News, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Science, U.S. Department of Energy Tagged With: ALCF, Gaute Hagen, INCITE, Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment, Jeff Nichols, Jeremy Smith, Judy Hill, Markus Eisenbach, Nouamane Laanait, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, OLCF, ORNL, Paul Kent, summit, Theta, Thomas Maier, Titan, U.S. Department of Energy, W. Raphael Hix

New 200-petaflop supercomputer to succeed Titan at ORNL

Posted at 1:11 am July 8, 2016
By John Huotari Leave a Comment

Summit Supercomputer Cabinets Graphic

This a graphical representation of the Summit computer cabinets. It is not a photograph of the final design. (Image courtesy ORNL/November 2014)

 

A new 200-petaflop supercomputer will succeed Titan at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and it could be available to scientists and researchers in 2018, a spokesperson said this week.

The new IBM supercomputer, named Summit, could about double the computing power of what is now the world’s fastest machine, a Chinese system named Sunway TaihuLight, according to a seminannual list of the world’s top supercomputers released in June.

Sunway TaihuLight is capable of 93 petaflops, according to the list, the TOP500 list. A petaflop is one quadrillion calculations per second. That’s 1,000 trillion calculations per second.

Summit, which is expected to start operating at ORNL early in 2018, is one of three supercomputers that the U.S. Department of Energy expects to exceed 100 petaflops at three U.S. Department of Energy laboratories in 2018. The three planned systems are:

  • the 200-petaflop Summit at ORNL, which is expected to be available to users in early 2018;
  • a 150-petaflop machine known as Sierra at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco in mid-2018; and
  • a 180-petaflop supercomputer called Aurora at Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago in late 2018.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Front Page News, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Top Stories, U.S. Department of Energy Tagged With: Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, Argonne National Laboratory, Aurora, central processing units, CPU, DOE, GPU, graphic processing units, high-performance computing, IBM, IBM POWER9 CPU, IBM supercomputer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Lynn Orr, Mellanox, Morgan McCorkle, National Nuclear Security Administration, National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology, National Supercomputing Center, National University of Defense Technology, NRCPC, NVIDIA, NVIDIA Volta GPU, Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Office of Science, OLCF, ORNL, petaflop, Sierra, summit, Sunway TaihuLight, supercomputer, Titan, Top500, U.S. Department of Energy

ORNL: Neutrons find ‘missing’ magnetism of plutonium

Posted at 12:44 pm July 12, 2015
By Oak Ridge National Laboratory Leave a Comment

Doug Abernathy and Marc Janoschek

Doug Abernathy, left, ARCS instrument scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Marc Janoschek, Los Alamos National Laboratory, prepare their sample for experiments at the Spallation Neutron Source. (Photo by ORNL)

 

Groundbreaking work at two U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories has confirmed plutonium’s magnetism, which scientists have long theorized but have never been able to experimentally observe. The advances that enabled the discovery hold great promise for materials, energy, and computing applications.

Plutonium was first produced in 1940, and its unstable nucleus allows it to undergo fission, making it useful for nuclear fuels as well as for nuclear weapons. Much less known, however, is that the electronic cloud surrounding the plutonium nucleus is equally unstable and makes plutonium the most electronically complex element in the periodic table, with intriguingly intricate properties for a simple elemental metal.

While conventional theories have successfully explained plutonium’s complex structural properties, they also predict that plutonium should order magnetically. This is in stark contrast with experiments, which had found no evidence for magnetic order in plutonium. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Front Page News, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Top Stories, U.S. Department of Energy Tagged With: ARCS, B. Chakrabarti, DOE, Doug Abernathy, dynamical mean field theory, electrons, Eric Bauer, European Commission, F. Trouw, G. Kotliar, G.H. Lander, J.-X. Zhu, J.D. Thompson, J.M. Lawrence, J.N. Mitchell, K. Haule, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory Directed Research and Development, M. Ramos, magnetic fluctuations, magnetic order, magnetism, Marc Janoschek, Mark Lumsden, national laboratories, neutron spectroscopy, Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Office of Science, OLCF, ORNL, Pinaki Das, plutonium, plutonium ion, plutonium nucleus, plutonium-239, plutonium-242, Rutgers University, S. Richmond, Science Advances, Scott McCall, Siegfried Hecker, Spallation Neutron Source, U.S. Department of Energy

Alexander: World’s fastest supercomputer will again be at ORNL

Posted at 10:09 am November 14, 2014
By John Huotari Leave a Comment

Summit Supercomputing Press Conference

U.S. Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, second from left, a Tennessee Republican, at a Friday morning press conference at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., with Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, right; Senator Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, center; and representatives Bill Foster and Dan Lipinski. (Submitted photo)

 

U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander

Lamar Alexander

Note: This story was last updated at 11:25 a.m.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory will have the world’s fastest next-generation supercomputer, U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander announced at a Friday morning press conference with U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz.

Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, said the new computer will provide five times the performance of Titan, the current system, and support advanced scientific and materials research to improve economic and national security.

The “next-generation hybrid supercomputer” will be called Summit, and it will be delivered in 2017, the senator said.

“Once again the world’s fastest computer will be in the United States, and once again it will be at Oak Ridge,” Alexander said. “Supercomputing has helped Tennessee become a center for advanced manufacturing with the arrival of new companies, including several in the auto industry, creating thousands of good-paying jobs. Tennessee can continue to thrive and create many more good jobs with the use of this new supercomputer.” [Read more…]

Filed Under: Federal, Government, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Top Stories, U.S. Department of Energy Tagged With: Barack Obama, Bill Foster, central processing unit, Chuck Fleischmann, climate change science, combustion science, Cray, Dan Lipinski, DOE, energy storage, Ernest Moniz, graphic processing unit, hybrid supercomputer, IBM, Jeff Nichols, Lamar Alexander, nuclear power, Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Office of Science, OLCF, ORNL, research, science, summit, supercomputer, supercomputing, technology, Titan, U.S. Department of Energy

INCITE grants awarded to 59 computational research projects

Posted at 11:01 am November 20, 2013
By Oak Ridge Today Staff Leave a Comment

Titan Supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory

The U.S. Department of Energy has announced 59 scientific projects that will share nearly six billion core hours on two of America’s fastest supercomputers, including the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, pictured above. (Photo courtesy of ORNL)

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science announced 59 projects, promising to accelerate scientific discovery and innovation, that will share nearly six billion core hours on two of America’s fastest supercomputers dedicated to open science. Their work will advance knowledge in critical areas from sustainable energy technologies to the environmental consequences of energy use.

The allocations come from the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment, or INCITE, program. Through it, the world’s most advanced computational research projects from academia, government, and industry are given access to DOE’s leadership computing facilities at Oak Ridge and Argonne national laboratories. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Front Page News, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Science, U.S. Department of Energy Tagged With: ALCF, Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, Argonne National Laboratory, core hours, Cray XK7, DOE, energy, IBM Blue Gene/Q, INCITE, INCITE grants, Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment, James Hack, Julia White, Leadership Computing Facilities, Michael Papka, Mira, National Center for Computational Sciences, Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Office of Science, OLCF, researchers, science, supercomputers, Titan, U.S. Department of Energy

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