Scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the U.S. state of Tennessee have unveiled what could be the world's fastest supercomputer.The new computer, named Titan, is capable of making more than 20,000 trillion calculations each second (20 petaflops), according to officials at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). That is roughly equivalent to each of the world's seven billion people being able to carry out three million calculations per second, according to ORNL. Titan also has more than 700 terabytes of memory.
"The numbers just end up so big that I struggle to come up with a way to explain it," said Buddy Bland, the project director of ORNL's Leadership Computing Facility. "It's unimaginable. Twenty petaflops is [the number] 20 followed by 15 zeros."
Titan is actually an upgrade to ORNL's previous world's best supercomputer, Jaguar. According to Bland, The new unit is roughly the same size as Jaguar, but is 10 times more powerful. Its components occupy a space about the area of a basketball court and are about two and a half meters high.