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Tech

Build Your Own Tiny Titan Supercomputer for Less than a Grand

With help from nine Raspberry Pi boards, micro-supercomputing can be yours.

The Titan supercomputer, the fastest in the world until 2013, cost around $60 million. With 200 cabinets holding many tens of thousands CPU and GPU cores, Titan is capable of speeds up to 17.59 petaflops per second—which is a 10 followed by 15 zeroes. Per second.

Titan and its supercomputing kin are wonders of parallel processing more than anything else. Just splitting computation between the two cores supporting the machine on which I'm typing is a challenge enough, but tying enough cores together to achieve Titan's processing capabilities is something else entirely.

Maybe it doesn't have to be, however. Enter Tiny Titan, a DIY miniature mock-up of Oak Ridge's beast. It only sports a mere nine single-core processors, but global-scale climate modeling isn't the point so much as a demonstration of the sort of deep parallelism of supercomputing. That processing power will only get more extreme as Titan's Summit successor, whose funding was announced by the Department of Energy last week, appears on the scene in 2018 with five times the computing power.

"Using an interactive fluid simulation … Tiny Titan's processors work in tandem to animate waves of colored particles," Troy Rummler writes at Fermilab's Symmetry Breaking. "As individual particles flow across the monitor, they pass from one processor to another, changing color on screen to match an LED on one of Tiny Titan's corresponding cores. Turning off one or more of the cores, as its program allows, puts a greater burden on the remaining cores and causes the program to lag."

And you can have your own. The Oak Ridge team has plans and code available at its Github page, with the hope that Tiny Titans will be adopted as computing learning tools in classrooms. The hardware guts are nine $40 Raspberry Pi boards, cables and ports to connect them, and an Xbox controller.