Titan

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (a.k.a. - Eggheadquarters) has a new toy, the new world champion supercomputer named Titan. And it's all thanks to video games:

Titan derives the majority of its oomph—more than 90%—from technology originally developed for the video-game industry. Half of its 37,376 processors are ordinary CPUs. But the other half are graphics processing units, or GPUs. These are specialised devices designed to cope with modern video games, which are some of the most demanding applications any home machine is ever likely to run.

Several years ago researchers at Nvidia and AMD (the two companies that produce most of the world’s high-performance GPUs) realised that many scientific problems which demand huge amounts of computing power—everything from climate simulations and modelling combustion in an engine to seismic analysis for the oil-and-gas industry—could be translated into a form that was digestible by their GPUs. Soon after, supercomputer builders such as Cray (which put Titan together using Nvidia’s GPUs) began to take notice.

Borrowing from the games industry in this way brings several benefits. One big one is efficiency. Titan is an upgrade of Oak Ridge’s existing “Jaguar” machine. Upgrading Jaguar with ordinary CPUs would have meant building a computer that sucked around 30MW of electricity when running flat out—enough juice to power a small town. Because GPUs are so good at their specialised tasks, Titan can achieve its blistering performance while sipping a (relatively) modest 8.2MW.

Maybe it can even run CryEngine3 at 30 frames per second. Maybe.