Tesla K20X supercomputer, the world's fastest machine (specifications and features)

Nvidia today introduced on a press release the world's fastest supercomputer according to to the TOP500 list released this morning at the SC12 supercomputing conference, the "Titan" machine based on the NVIDIA Tesla K20 family of GPU accelerators.

What make this machine the fastest and most powerful supercomputer is the whooping 18,688 NVIDIA Tesla K20X GPU accelerators based on the Kepler architecture every GPU is packed with a total of 2688 stream processors, all that interconnected and working together to resolve the most complected calculation, the supercomputer is now based on Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge Tenn, and the benchmark result of this one according to LINPACK benchmark software is 17.59 petaflops.


Specifications table of the Tesla K20x Vs K20:

	Tesla K20X	Tesla K20
Stream Processors	2688	2496
Core Clock	732MHz	706MHz
Shader Clock	N/A	N/A
Memory Clock	5.2GHz GDDR5	5.2GHz GDDR5
Memory Bus Width	384-bit	320-bit
VRAM	6GB	5GB
Single Precision	3.95 TFLOPS	3.52 TFLOPS
Double Precision	1.31 TFLOPS (1/3)	1.17 TFLOPS (1/3)
Transistor Count	7.1B	7.1B
TDP	235W	225W
Manufacturing Process	TSMC 28nm	TSMC 28nm
Architecture	Kepler	Kepler
Launch Price	>$3199	$3199?

Check the press release bellow for more details and benchmarks leaked from Nvidia.

PR highlights:

The new family also includes the Tesla K20 accelerator, which provides 3.52 teraflops of single-precision and 1.17 teraflops of double-precision peak performance. Tesla K20X and K20 GPU accelerators representing more than 30 petaflops of performance have already been delivered in the last 30 days. This is equivalent to the computational performance of last year's 10 fastest supercomputers combined.

"We are taking advantage of NVIDIA GPU architectures to significantly accelerate simulations in such diverse areas as climate and meteorology, seismology, astrophysics, fluid mechanics, materials science, and molecular biophysics," said Dr. Thomas Schulthess, professor of computational physics at ETH Zurich and director of the Swiss National Supercomputing Center. "The K20 family of accelerators represents a leap forward in computing compared to NVIDIA's prior Fermi architecture, enhancing productivity and enabling us potentially to achieve new insights that previously were impossible."

Additional early customers include: Clemson University, Indiana University, Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab), King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), University of Southern California (USC), and Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU).

Energy-Efficiency for "Greener" Data Centers
The Tesla K20X GPU accelerator delivers three times higher energy efficiency than previous-generation GPU accelerators and widens the efficiency advantage compared to CPUs.

Using Tesla K20X accelerators, Oak Ridge's Titan achieved 2,142.77 megaflops of performance per watt, which surpasses the energy efficiency of the No. 1 system on the most recent Green500 list of the world's most energy-efficient supercomputers.

 Benchmark results:

When Tesla K20X GPU accelerators are added to servers with Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs, many applications are accelerated up to 10x or more, including:
● MATLAB (engineering) - 18.1 times faster
● Chroma (physics) - 17.9 times faster
● SPECFEM3D (earth science) - 10.5 times faster
● AMBER (molecular dynamics) - 8.2 times faster

Click to enlarge the pictures:

If you cant to read more about the new Nvidia's Titan, check this document.

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