NVIDIA unveiled the NVIDIAR TeslaR
K20 family of GPU accelerators, the highest performance, most efficient
accelerators ever built, and the technology powering Titan, the world's
fastest supercomputer according to the TOP500 list
released this morning at the SC12
supercomputing conference.
Armed with 18,688 NVIDIA Tesla K20X GPU accelerators, the
Titan
supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., seized
the No. 1 supercomputer ranking in the world from Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory's Sequoia system with a performance record of 17.59
petaflops as measured by the LINPACK benchmark.(1)
Tesla K20 - Performance, Energy-Efficiency Leadership
Based on the revolutionary NVIDIA
KeplerT compute
architecture, the new Tesla K20 family features the Tesla K20X accelerator,
the flagship of NVIDIA's Tesla accelerated computing product line.
Providing the highest computing performance ever available in a single
processor, the K20X provides tenfold application acceleration when paired
with leading CPUs.(2) It surpasses all other processors on two common
measures of computational performance - 3.95 teraflops single-precision and
1.31 teraflops double-precision peak floating point performance.
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 GPUs 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.(3)
Fasteston Broadest Range of Data Center Applications
The Tesla K20 family accelerates the broadest range of scientific,
engineering and commercial
high performance computingand data center applications. Today,
more than 200
software applicationstake advantage ofGPU-acceleration, representing a 60
percent increase in less than a year.
When Tesla K20X GPU acceleratorsare added to servers with Intel Sandy Bridge
CPUs, many applications are accelerated up to 10x or more, including:(4)
. 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