KNOXVILLE – East Tennessee is now home to two of the
world's three fastest computers, according to new rankings released
today.
The Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers places
University of Tennessee supercomputer Kraken in third place, where
it also holds the title of world's fastest academic supercomputer,
while Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Jaguar computer took first
place overall.
Kraken, the result of a $65 million grant to UT from the
National Science Foundation, recently became only the fourth
computer in history to perform more than 1,000 trillion
calculations per second, known as a petaflop.
"Winning a $65 million NSF award put the UT among the
supercomputing elite, and now we have reached the pinnacle in
having the world's fastest academic supercomputer," said Jan Simek,
interim UT president. "This is a phenomenal achievement and is
among growing distinctions that enable us to continue attracting
the best faculty and the best students we have ever had, and to
make our university the best it has ever been."
The twice-yearly Top500 is published by Jack Dongarra, a UT
Knoxville distinguished professor of computer science and the
director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory along with
colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the
University of Mannheim.
Since its creation in 2007, Kraken has been used for nearly 300
scientific projects addressing vital questions in areas from
climate and weather modeling to applications in genetics and
medicine.
"The beauty of Kraken is not just its computing power, but its
problem-solving power," said UT Knoxville Chancellor Jimmy G.
Cheek. "Scientists from universities around the country, including
many here at UT Knoxville, have put Kraken to use to attack
humanity's most pressing problems. It is an invaluable resource to
this university to be home to such a powerful asset."
With the combined computing power of UT and ORNL, East Tennessee
is now firmly ensconced as a center for supercomputing activities,
a fact which is continuing to draw even more scientific resources
to the area, leading not only to technological
"Kraken is the result of a powerful and expanding partnership
between the University of Tennessee and the Oak Ridge National
Laboratory to advance the frontier of scientific discovery and
innovation from climate change to energy technologies and from
basic to applied sciences," said Thomas Zacharia, deputy director
for science and technology at ORNL and a UT Knoxville
professor.
"When NSF made the award to UT Knoxville to develop Kraken just
over a year ago I said that 'like the gargantuan sea monster
Kraken, which inspired the naming of this supercomputer, the
possibilities in scientific and engineering advances it enables are
enormous, limited only by the confines of human imagination and
vision beyond the frontiers of science,'" said NSF Director Arden
L. Bement. "Today, Kraken is working to realize that vision.
Consistent with ORNL's leadership in building what many would
consider to be one of the most diverse and valuable computation
centers in the world, Kraken will address some of the most complex
problems of our era."
In October, the NSF awarded UT Knoxville an additional $10
million grant to create a new computer called Nautilus designed to
help analyze and process the complex data created by massive
computers like Kraken and Jaguar. Nautilus and its accompying
research center will be part of UT's National Institute for
Computational Sciences (NICS), which also manages Kraken.
Both Kraken and Jaguar are Cray XT5 supercomputers. Kraken alone
has 100,000 processors that work simultaneously to produce the high
speeds at which the computer is capable to address major scientific
questions.
Jaguar clocked in at a sustained speed of 1.759 petaflops, while
Kraken registered 831 teraflops.
In the most recent version of the list, Kraken ranked sixth
while Jaguar was in second place. In addition to Kraken and Jaguar,
East Tennessee also is home to two more machines ranked in the
world's top 30, with ORNL's original Jaguar Cray XT4 system at 16th
and UT's Athena in 30th.
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