Cray Titan Supercomputer Now the World’s Fastest; IBM's Sequoia No. 2

IBM's Sequoia supercomputer in June became the first U.S.-based system to reach No. 1 on the Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers. Six months later, the system—at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory—was moved to No. 2, displaced by Cray's huge Titan supercomputer, housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Titan, a massive XK7 system powered by Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices and GPU accelerators from Nvidia, hit a performance of 17.59 petaflops—or quadrillions of calculations per second—outdistancing Sequoia's 16.32 petaflops. The latest Top500 list—two are released every year—was unveiled Nov. 12 at the SC12 supercomputer show in Salt Lake City, and the systems continue to get more powerful. According to the list's organizers, there are 23 supercomputers on the Top500 list that offer more than a petaflops of performance. This is only four years after the first petaflops system—IBM's Roadrunner—hit the list. In addition, a growing number of systems are using accelerators—such as GPU accelerators from Nvidia and AMD, or Xeon Phi coprocessors from Intel—to increase the performance of the supercomputers, particularly when running highly parallel workloads. The list of the top 10 supercomputers has many prominent names on it, though there are a few new ones, including Stampede, housed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) in Austin. Here are the top 10.