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Kraken is the most powerful academic supercomputer

By The Inquirer
10:58 Oct 12, 2009 | 17 Comments
Tags: super | computer | news

A petaFLOPS of peak power!

NICS, the US National Institute for Computational Sciences has just upgraded its Cray XT5 supercomputer called Kraken.

The machine has become the first academic system to surpass a quadrillion floating-point operations per second, or one petaFLOPS. The upgrade also puts the Kraken among the top five supercomputers in the world.

The system came online on 5th October with a peak performance of 1.03 petaFLOPS. It features more than 16,000 six-core 2.6-GHz AMD Istanbul processors with nearly 100,000 compute cores.

It also has 129 terabytes of memory, which doubles the size of Kraken for researchers running some of the world's most sophisticated 3D scientific computing applications.

The boffins who built the beast hope that it will enable academic users to explore problems that were previously inaccessible. These include understanding the mechanism behind the explosion of core-collapse supernovas, how many angels can fit onto the head of a pin and tricky questions such as, "How did Crazy Frog ever get to number one?"

The system is linked to the NSF-supported Teragrid, a network of supercomputers across the US that is the world's largest computational platform for open scientific research.

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17 Comments

CloAkEd Oct 12, 2009 11:18 AM	Yeah but can it run Crysis at max settings?
thermalman Oct 12, 2009 11:25 AM	Sad, but so true!
thesorehead Oct 12, 2009 11:59 AM	Was kinda surprised to see it was running on AMD rather than Intel. Go green masheen! Also: "been a long time gone, Constantinople / why did Constantinople get the works? / That's nobody's business but the Turks'"
thermalman Oct 12, 2009 12:21 PM	Out of the 10 fastest supercomputers in the world only 2 run on intel processors
Jeruselem Oct 12, 2009 1:29 PM	Kinda weird AMD can power supercomputers and don't seem to get it right with desktops and laptops.
A Hitman Oct 12, 2009 2:02 PM	It runs AMD cause its cheaper.
wlayton27 Oct 12, 2009 2:11 PM	"100,000 cores" ?? Is this some cloud supercomputer? I recommended a popular console to include a cloud nfs academic project ... but did they listen? no ... */ranting is fun.
spaced Oct 12, 2009 2:54 PM	Wonder how a gpgpu super-computer would compare price wise.
fliptopia Oct 12, 2009 3:30 PM	What sort of volume discount do you get if you buy in quantities of 100,000?
deuce_23 Oct 12, 2009 4:03 PM	what will there power bill be like? They should over clock
merlin13 Oct 12, 2009 4:06 PM	The after-hours LAN games shouldn't have any Server lag now...
thermalman Oct 12, 2009 4:59 PM	i think the thermal design power for just the cpus would equal about 1.9 million watts
majestic975 Oct 12, 2009 5:23 PM	I can just imagine all those scientific geeks in their white lab coats, late at night dwnloading porn on it !!
Argotha Oct 12, 2009 8:57 PM	they dont download it, they raytrace it the night before
Warheart Oct 12, 2009 10:41 PM	"What sort of volume discount do you get if you buy in quantities of 100,000?" haha xD
BMM Oct 13, 2009 8:10 AM	Kraken is 88 cabinets at approximately 32 Kilowatts each (under load) which gives it a power consumption of about 2.8 Megawatts. What you don't see in the picture, is an even bigger Cray XT5 sitting behind Kraken, known as Jaguar. This system is also undergoing an upgrade to the 6-core Instanbul processors currently. Jaguar is a 200 cabinet system.
MrPodgy Oct 15, 2009 2:41 AM	what would this hit on aqua3d?

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