We spent a few minutes at the Oak Ridge SC11 booth talking with Jack Wells who is, not coincidentally, with Oak Ridge.  He’s looking forward to the newest addition to the Oak Ridge supercomputer family, the Titan. This new system isn’t entirely new; it’s actually an upgrade of the existing AMD Istanbul-based petaflop-scale Jaguar supercomputer.

Beginning very soon, Jaguar will receive an upgraded interconnect, new AMD 16-core CPUs, and a shiny new NVIDIA Kepler GPU – plus, assumedly, a ‘Titan’ nameplate that will replace the ‘Jaguar’ badge.

When completed in 2012, Titan will perform somewhere around 20 PFlops, which will land it near the top of the Top500 list – if not in the top spot.

In the video, Jack talks about some of Titan’s scientific workloads, including combustion and materials research, plus battery chemistry simulation. We also discuss the concept of ‘sustained performance’ (a key theme at SC11), what the term means to Oak Ridge, and why it’s important to their work.