U Tenn's "Kraken" breaks petascale barrier

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The University of Tennessee announced this week that their 100,000 core Cray XT5 super has become the fourth machine to break the PFLOPS barrier, and is the first academic machine to do so.

Kraken supercomputer“At over a petaflop of peak computing power, and the ability to routinely run full machine jobs, Kraken will dominate large-scale NSF computing in the near future,” said Phil Andrews, director of the National Institute for Computational Science, which manages Kraken. “Its unprecedented computational capability and total available memory will allow academic users to treat problems that were previously inaccessible.”

This is a machine that the university, and the state, is rightly proud of, and you can the work it’s taken to make the project a reality within the state between the lines of the press release

Along the way, the computer, funded by a $65 million grant to UT Knoxville from the National Science Foundation, has created more than 25 full-time jobs and helped place Tennessee at the center of big science. Kraken first entered operation in late 2007, and has expanded through a series of planned upgrades that have made it progressively faster and more powerful. The computer’s most recent upgrade was officially completed today.

…“Having Kraken has made UT Knoxville a magnet for great faculty and world-leading research,” said UT Knoxville Chancellor Jimmy G. Cheek. “Being the first academic computer this powerful means that we will continue not only to enhance our reputation as a research institution, but also that we will continue to take the lead in making life better for people both in Tennessee and around the world.”