Off to super fast start
Jan 26th, 2009 in News
The newest supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is up and running, and it’s running really fast.
The Cray XT5 system, dubbed “Kraken” after the mythical sea monster, is capable of 615 trillion mathematical calculations per second, or 615 teraflops – making it the fastest computer in the world set up exclusively for academic uses.
Kraken was funded by the National Science Foundation as part of a $65 million grant won by the University of Tennessee and its partners, including ORNL. The supercomputer will be upgraded with faster processors about a year from now, when it’s expected to surpass the petaflops barrier – a quadrillion (or 1,000 trillion) calculations per second.
The new machine was installed adjacent to an even faster one, the Cray XT5 “Jaguar,” which recently was ranked the second-fastest computer in the world at 1.6 petaflops and the world’s fastest machine for open scientific uses.
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