TITAN ARCHITECTURE OVERVIEW

This chapter presents the first-generation Titan architecture and discusses its design priorities. It discusses the history of the design and construction of Titan. It explores the premises upon which the architecture was based—premises that led to the definition of a new class of computers. Closely coupled to the architectural vision is the strategic plan to bring an implementation to market in a timely manner. The chapter provides an overview on the concept of visualized computation. The advances in semiconductor technology can be used to design a high-performance scientific workstation whose numerical processing power was previously only available in supercomputer class machines. The goal of the Titan architecture is to provide a single-user supercomputer with the ability to visualize the results of complex computations. To achieve this goal, Titan needs to provide high performance by using an attached vector processor at reasonably low cost. Typical applications for single-user visualization supercomputers are primarily scientific and engineering programs.