National Center for Computational Sciences

At least for the moment, the world’s fastest supercomputer is devoted to solving scientific questions that may save the planet – climate change, renewable energy, new medicines – rather than advances in nuclear weapons that might blow it up.

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s high-performance Jaguar XT5 computer, built by Seattle-based Cray Inc., was named Monday as the fastest on the planet in the latest semiannual TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

After a $19.9 million upgrade funded with federal economic stimulus money, Jaguar posted a performance speed of 1.759 petaflops or quadrillions of calculations per second.

That dropped previous No. 1 Los Alamos National Laboratory’s IBM Roadrunner system in New Mexico to No. 2 with a speed of 1.04 petaflops.

Jaguar’s stablemate at Oak Ridge, named Kraken, was ranked No. 3 with a speed of 831.7 teraflops or trillions of calculations per second. That makes the National Science Foundation-funded, Cray-built supercomputer owned by the University of Tennessee and the National Institute for Computational Sciences the top “academic” supercomputer in the world.

Continue reading at The Washington Post.