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Introduction to computer architecture
Published in Joseph D. Dumas, Computer Architecture, 2016
High-performance, large-scale computers have consumed a great deal of electrical power ever since they were first built in the 1940s and 50s. The UNIVAC I, for example, operated at about 125 kilowatts; like many large systems that followed it, the UNIVAC required its own dedicated air-conditioning system that used chilled water and a powerful air blower, adding considerable cost to the overall system. In the decades since, as manufacturers have crammed ever-greater computing power into smaller and smaller spaces, the challenges of heat removal have only increased. By the 1970s, the Cray-1 supercomputer needed a patented liquid cooling system (using Freon refrigerant) to keep its logic circuits cool enough to operate. Its contemporary descendant, Titan (a Cray XK7 system housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, ranked number 2 on the November 2015 Top 500 list) draws a staggering 8.2 MW of power, but can be air-cooled as it is physically much larger than the Cray-1 (approximately 5000 square feet, or 465 square meters, in size). To be fair to Titan, however, it consumes only about 14.6 watts per each of its 560,640 computational cores (including CPUs and GPUs).
Application of the Denovo Discrete Ordinates Radiation Transport Code to Large-Scale Fusion Neutronics
Published in Fusion Science and Technology, 2018
Katherine E. Royston, Seth R. Johnson, Thomas M. Evans, Scott W. Mosher, Jonathan Naish, Bor Kos
These studies were performed on the Titan Cray XK7 supercomputer at the OLCF. Titan has 18 688 compute nodes, each with a 16-core AMD Opteron CPU, an NVIDIA Kepler GPU, and 32 GB of RAM. The number of nodes used for each simulation was driven by the level of decomposition needed to fit the problem on the cluster.