The Titan, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, is the world’s most powerful supercomputer. It does 17.59 thousand-trillion calculations (petaflops) per second. The 4,300-square-foot monster achieves this insane number of parallel by pairing powerful CPUs with GPUs (graphical processing units): GPUs have many threads of execution. While each one may run slower than traditional threads, there are simply so many threads that a much higher performance can be achieved, with a minimal increase in power consumption. Modern GPUs were introduced by Nvidia in the late 90s as a way of handling the myriad numerous graphical functions necessary to render…