We got a new computer...

[IROC]

Oak Ridge National Laboratory - ORNL Debuts Titan Supercomputer

Titan, a system capable of churning through more than 20,000 trillion calculations each second—or 20 petaflops—by employing a family of processors called graphic processing units first created for computer gaming.

The Cray XK7 system contains 18,688 nodes, with each holding a 16-core AMD Opteron 6274 processor and an NVIDIA Tesla K20 graphics processing unit (GPU) accelerator. Titan also has more than 700 terabytes of memory.

[GH85Carrera]

770 TB of memory. Wow.

I thought my 32 gigs of ram in my 64 bit Win 7 computer was a lot.

I was too lazy to read the entire article. What is the price range for that monster?

[widgeon13]

I have no idea what they are talking about but it's probably faster than my apple.

Wonder what something like that cost?

[IROC]

I'm not sure what the cost was, but I know our power bill is significant.

[GH85Carrera]

A friend of mine worked at the FAA back when it was the CAA. Their first computer had 2K of RAM. It was housed in a building all by itself with a giant AC system. He had to write the software and was very good at tight code. They paid mega thousands of dollars for an additional 2K of RAM.

It is mind boggling how far computers have come since then. I bet the FAA computer cost as much or more than the new one at Oak Ridge.

[Jim Richards]

Nice computer, Mike! All you need for that baby is a good windoze operating system.

[quicksix]

When does it become self aware?

[URY914]

Wayne needs to tap in the that baby to keep this site hummin'.

[Evans, Marv]

Is this the one they compared to the chinese computer that was claimed to be 47% faster? I'm hoping that claim is no longer true & never will be made again.

[kaisen]

It cost ORNL a little over $100,000,000 to *upgrade* from their Cray Jaguar that was capable of 2.3 petaflops.

The systems draws 9 megawatts of power

I 'knew' Seymour Cray and quite a few of his senior engineers, including Steve Chen, back in the day. He was a weird dude.

[ZOA NOM]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

A friend of mine worked at the FAA back when it was the CAA. Their first computer had 2K of RAM. It was housed in a building all by itself with a giant AC system. He had to write the software and was very good at tight code. They paid mega thousands of dollars for an additional 2K of RAM.

It is mind boggling how far computers have come since then. I bet the FAA computer cost as much or more than the new one at Oak Ridge.

You'd be surprised that the new stuff in FAA is off the shelf, 90's technology networked machinery, and the software is so filled with bugs, you'd never fly again if you saw it in action. I miss the old stuff, as they say, "worked fine, lasted long time". The bean counters are going to get somebody killed.

[dad911]

Remember these?

[RWebb]

funny - I was just reading a news article on that puppy...


you should be able to have some really fast games of Little Brick Out now!

[krystar]

700 tb.....not enough to hold my pr0n collection.

[Outback Porsche]

It wasn't all that long ago that I used to maintain one of these 'state of the art' little things. Mind boggles every day

[flipper35]

Anandtech.com had a good article about it.

AnandTech - Inside the Titan Supercomputer: 299K AMD x86 Cores and 18.6K NVIDIA GPUs

[RWebb]

Nat'l Geogr. is the article I skimmed - Google News feed will take you there.

In a related note, IBM has made a breakthru on using carbon nanotubes for circuit design. Think small, people...

[red-beard]

Originally Posted by ZOA NOM

You'd be surprised that the new stuff in FAA is off the shelf, 90's technology networked machinery, and the software is so filled with bugs, you'd never fly again if you saw it in action. I miss the old stuff, as they say, "worked fine, lasted long time". The bean counters are going to get somebody killed.

I had buddies that worked on one of the replacement systems. This was around 1991 and they were there to "fix" the buggy software. It was my understanding that they had to start over a couple of years later.

[ZOA NOM]

Originally Posted by red-beard

I had buddies that worked on one of the replacement systems. This was around 1991 and they were there to "fix" the buggy software. It was my understanding that they had to start over a couple of years later.

Tru dat, they wasted a TON of money trying to get it right. The scary part nowadays is that there is so much pressure to privatize and contract out the work, that we will one day lose the oversight that has no profit motive, then it's just a matter of acceptable losses vs lawsuit payouts. The only thing keeping private companies from doing our work is the concept of certification. We certify the systems that controllers use. A private company can't afford that liability, so we are still civil servants. For now.