With a throughput capacity of more than 20 petaflops, Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s new Titan supercomputer, which Oak Ridge said opened for business Monday, could be the most powerful computer yet.

When the latest release of the biannual Top500 supercomputing rankings are released in several weeks, Titan is likely to come in either first place or a close second place to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Sequoia, which topped June’s list with a peak of 20.1 petaflops. According to Oak Ridge, this type of power “is on par with each of the world’s 7 billion people being able to carry out 3 million calculations per second.”

The Department of Energy, which oversees the national laboratories, will use Titan for research on a number of different topics, including biofuels, combustion engine efficiency, magnetics, astrophysics, climate, nuclear science and atomic-level materials science, among others.
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