According to reports, Nvidia processors will be used by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory for developing a fast supercomputer to be used in its Department of Energy (DOE) facility --- the machine will apparently be the fastest supercomputer in the world!

Going by the information shared by processor vendor Oak Ridge, the company has already started working on the first phase of the so-called `Titan' supercomputer, which will chiefly be a Cray XK6 system that will improve upon its currently-in-use Jaguar supercomputer with 960 Tesla M2090 GPUs from Nvidia.

The second phase of the `Titan' supercomputer development will commence in 2012, when Oak Ridge will equip the machine with as many as 18,000 Tesla GPUs based on `Kepler' - which is the code-name for Nvidia's next- generation processor architecture.

Nvidia has revealed that the Oak Ridge's `Titan' is expected to dethrone Japan's top-notch K computer - which is the leading 8.2 petaflop machine - with its potential to deliver a peak performance of a staggering 20 petaflops. In addition, Oak Ridge will also aim at ensuring that `Titan' is more energy-efficient than K.

Revealing that `Titan' will be used by the DOE facility for an array of research activities, including material science, energy technology, medical research and geoscience, Jeff Nichols - associate laboratory director for Oak Ridge's Computing and Computational Sciences - said Titan's substantially high computing power will benefit all areas of science; thus "opening the doors for new discoveries that so far have been out of reach."