Oak Ridge National Laboratory this month awarded a $97 million contract to Cray to upgrade the country’s most powerful supercomputer, which is used to conduct energy research for the DOE.

The transformed computer, dubbed Titan, will be used to study the safe extension of the lifecycles of nuclear power plants, the commercially viable production of biofuels, and its simulations will aid the development of new materials for photocells and battery technology to store energy.

The current system, called Jaguar, (as noted) is the most powerful supercomputer in the U.S. and the world’s third-most powerful supercomputer. The upgrade will replace all of the current Jaguar AMD processors with the latest AMD Opteron processors, code-named "Interlagos." And the system will use graphics processing units (GPUs) to complement the computational power of the new processors. This marrying of GPUs to traditional computer processors is a relatively new phenomenon that is quickly being adopted in the world of high-performance computing because it boosts the speed of some scientific algorithms, while helping to reduce the energy consumption of the computer system.  

The upgrade is to be completed by 2013 and could increase the system’s raw processing power by an order of magnitude or more. This will allow more detailed simulations to be performed. In some cases, that means the system could support simulations with a finer temporal or spatial resolution, in other cases, models could simply simulate longer time scales. This will let energy researchers gain better insight into physical systems and processes.

"All of these areas of science will benefit from Titan's enormous increase in computational power," said ORNL Director Thom Mason in a statement. "Titan will allow for significantly greater realism in models and simulations and the resulting scientific breakthroughs and technological innovations will provide the return on this national investment. Discoveries that take weeks, even on a system as powerful as Jaguar, might take days on Titan."