There's a new supercomputer on the block, Titan, and boy is it damn powerful. The Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National labs flicked the 'on' switch on Titan, powering up the latest, fastest supercomputer.

Titan sports 299,008 CPU cores, 18,688 GPUs, and over 700 terabytes of memory - wow. Titan is capable of a peak speed of 27 quadrillion calculations per second (petaflops), which is ten times the power of its predecessor, and has now slotted into the spot of the world's fastest supercomputer.

Titan is based on the Cray XK7 system, sporting 18,688 computing nodes, each sporting an AMD Opteron 6274 processor, and NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPU accelerator. NVIDIA's GPUs do most of the computing calculations for simulations, with the Opteron cores managing the GPUs.

Titan takes up 4,352 square feet of floorspace in ORNL's National Center for Computational Sciences. Someone has to say it, and I'll be the first - can it run Crysis? I know people are going to cringe at the thought of the old "can it run Crysis", but I still get a laugh out of it.