Tennessee Hosts World's Speediest Academic Computer

March 4, 2010

It's called the Kraken. Housed at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, it has been ranked as the fastest academic supercomputer—and sixth most powerful worldwide.

This according to Jack Dongarra, (director of UT's Innovative Computing Laboratory), who, along with colleagues from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Mannheim, publish a twice-yearly listing of computer supremacy, called the Top500.

The Kraken, which is the result of a $65 million NSF grant to the university, can do than 1,000 trillion calculations per second (called a petaflop). Since its creation two years ago, The Kraken has been used in 300 scientific projects, addressing problems in climate and weather modeling, genetics, medicine, energy, and applied sciences.

"The beauty of Kraken is not just its computing power, but its problem-solving power," claimed UT Knoxville Chancellor Jimmy G. Cheek. "Scientists from universities around the country have put Kraken to use to attack humanity's most pressing problems," he said.  

The Kraken is a Cray XT5 supercomputer and has 100,000 processors that work simultaneously to produce its high speed: 831 teraflops. Last October, the NSF awarded UT Knoxville a $10 million grant to create another supercomputer, called Nautilus, to analyze and process the complex data produced by The Kraken. 

Source: University of Tennessee Press Release; National Institute for Computational Sciences