The U.S. Department of Energy's

The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory has just launched a new era of scientific supercomputing with 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. That kind of computational capabi

lity—almost unimaginable—is on par with each of the world’s 7 billion people being able to carry out 3 million calculations per second. Titan will be 10 times more powerful than ORNL's last world-leading system, Jaguar, while overcoming power and space limitations inherent in the previous generation of high-performance computers.

Titan, which is supported by the Department of Energy, will provide unprecedented computing power for research in energy, climate change, efficient engines, materials and other disciplines and pave the way for a wide range of achievements in science and technology.