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Farewell Titan

Technology

Making Room for Frontier

One of the challenges of cutting-edge equipment at a cutting-edge laboratory is that when a problem arises, the answers are never straightforward. As the 2021 delivery date for Frontier -- ORNL's next supercomputer -- looms closer and closer, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility is undergoing some major remodeling, including…
Will Wells
January 26, 2020
Eric LentzPeopleScience

The Last User of Titan

Titan, the groundbreaking Cray XK7 supercomputer operated by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), was officially decommissioned on August 1. The petascale machine ran countless simulations over its 7 years of service, and its sheer computational power…
Will Wells
January 2, 2020
Image Credit: iStockScience

From Simulation to Automation in a Data-Rich World

In a farewell nod to Titan, scheduled to be decommissioned in August 2019, we present a short series of features highlighting some of Titan’s impactful contributions to scientific research. Long before the first computers were invented, intelligent robots appeared in myths, stories, and other works of fiction. In recent years,…
Rachel McDowell
August 29, 2019
In this visualization from David Pugmire at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a team led by Jeroen Tromp at Princeton University is imaging the interior of the Earth with adjoint tomography.Science

A Data-Driven Journey to the Center of the Earth

In a farewell nod to Titan, scheduled to be decommissioned in August 2019, we present a short series of features highlighting some of Titan’s impactful contributions to scientific research. In Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, an impatient geology professor leads a subterranean expedition in search of…
Jonathan Hines
July 5, 2019
Titan supercomputer OLCFTechnology

Farewell, Titan

The Cray XK7 Titan supercomputer operated by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) will be decommissioned on August 1 and disassembled for recycling. Performing up to 27 quadrillion calculations per second, Titan ranked as one of the…
Katie Elyce Jones
June 28, 2019
Science

Breaching the Biomass Problem

In a farewell nod to Titan, scheduled to be decommissioned in August 2019, we present a short series of features highlighting some of Titan’s impactful contributions to scientific research. https://vimeo.com/307039163 A visualization of a cellulose fiber (green) interacting with lignin (brown). Using supercomputers like the OLCF’s Cray XK7 Titan, ORNL…
Jonathan Hines
December 20, 2018