On Oct. 14 HPCwire interviewed Buddy Bland, project director of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, and Jim Hack, director of the National Center for Computational Sciences, about Titan, the first U.S.-based petascale supercomputer to employ graphics processing units (GPUs)—application-code accelerators—as well as central processing units (CPUs). The Oak Ridge National Laboratory supercomputer will calculate at speeds of up to 20 petaflops (quadrillion calculations per second) and is expected to begin data-production runs in 2013.
HPCwire Editor Michael Feldman and InterSect360 Research CEO Addison Snell conducted the interview, which detailed how Cray will upgrade the Jaguar supercomputer with AMD CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs to transform it into Titan, a resource with enhanced memory bandwidth and more powerful compute nodes. The discussion also explored the advantages of GPUs in meeting the needs of scientific users and the importance of programming efforts that improve code performance on supercomputers with diverse architectures.
To hear the interview, go to HPCwire Soundbite and click on the Download MP3 link.
