From climate research to protein folding, earthquake predicting to plasma physics simulations, and cosmological structure formation to mathematical modeling of heart rhythm disorders, Kraken is doing it all.

Kraken, the National Institute for Computational Sciences' (NCIS's) Cray XT5 supercomputer that is managed by the University of Tennessee, is paving the way for academic scientific research.  Recently, the supercomputer got an upgrade, making it the first academic system to surpass a thousand trillion calculations per second, or one petaflop. 

Kraken is only the fourth supercomputer in the world to break the petascale barrier

The system features 16,000 six-core 2.6-Ghz AMD Istanbul processors with nearly 100,000 computing cores.  An upgrade to 129 terabytes of memory, which the press release from NICS calls "the equivalent of more than 13 thousand movies on DVD", doubles the size of Kraken's capacity. 

To put the sheer power of Kraken into perspective Jim Ferguson, Director of Education Outreach and Training for NICS, uses a well-known UT landmark: "(Kraken's power is equal to) if everyone in Neyland Stadium was sitting, using a laptop networked together."  -Jim Ferguson

Not that Kraken is anything like your Windows, Mac, or Linux machine you are on right now.  No, Kraken is meant to do a little more than watch YouTube videos and update Twitter. 

Academic institutions request time on the machine and use its computing power to do science once only imagined.  "Better science" to put it plainly is what Ferguson says the upgrade to Kraken hopes to achieve.  Ferguson says that Kraken's new upgrades will allow for larger simulations and more detailed structures that will help achieve that "better science". 

According to the press release more than 250 projects are currently being worked on or have already taken place since it came online in 2007 at ORNL.  UT Knoxville faculty has performed 33 projects on the system, which is more than any other university.

Kraken is part of TeraGrid, the National Science Foundation's nationwide network of computers.