For comparison, a couple weeks ago Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Titan computer topped the Top500 list for fastest supercomputer in the world (although that t

For comparison, a couple weeks ago Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Titan computer topped the Top500 list for fastest supercomputer in the world (although that title is a bit misleading). Here's the specs on Titan: 18,688 AMD Opteron 6274 16-core CPUs 18,688 Nvidia Tesla K20 GPUs 17.59 petaflops Titan displaced Sequoia (at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) from the top spot on Top500. Interestingly enough, Sequoia uses a very different architecture, based on 16-core PowerPC A2 nodes rather than GPUs. Sequoia also has about 1.6PB of memory, while Titan "only" has 1PB. Both computers have reasonably different use cases. GPUs are great for embarrassingly parallel, non-memory intensive tasks like brute forcing passwords. But all of the rumors about the NSA's massive data analysis needs suggests that they may need a cluster that resembles Sequoia (with fewer cores, but larger caches and available memory) more than Titan.