Energy efficient video game technology in Titan supercomputer

Oak Ridge National Laboratory News Release:

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Media Contact: Fred Strohl Communications and Media Relations 865.574.4165

Energy efficient video game technology in Titan supercomputer

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OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Dec. 27, 2012 — Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Titan Supercomputer - the world's most powerful supercomputer - is operating with improved energy efficiency due in part to the same upgraded technology in your child's video games.

"They do a lot of the same physics and on processors that are much more energy efficient than the ones we were using for scientific computation," said Jeff Nichols, ORNL's associate laboratory director for computing and computational sciences. "We took advantage of the gaming industry to give us 10 times more powerful processors and we only increased energy costs by half of what we were spending on specific systems today."

Titan is able to perform more than 17 quadrillion calculations per second.

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy's Office of Science. DOE's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov <http://science.energy.gov/>.