That's a lot of flops

A QUANTUM OF SCIENCE

Kraken supercomputer sets new computational standard

Peta. It’s the scientific prefix that means a thousand times bigger than a trillion – or to put it another way, "a million times a million times a thousand."

Question: How big is that?

Answer: Really, really big. A petasecond is eleven million years. A petainch is sixteen million miles. And a petaflop is a thousand trillion calculations per second. That record was just set by the Cray Xt5 supercomputer, better known as the Kraken.

Operated by the University of Tennessee for the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Kraken is the newest addition to the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS), and features more than 16,000 six-core 2.6-GHz AMD Istanbul processors with nearly 100,000 computer cores.

The new supercomputer will be used for scientific modeling studies, especially those requiring literally astronomical numbers of calculations – such as modeling core-collapse supernovas, believed to be responsible for over half the current elements in the galaxy. With the previous generation of high-performance supercomputers, astrophysicists had to make approximations that severely impacted the accuracy of their results. With the Kraken, new vistas in computational capability have opened up that will allow researchers to ask better questions and expand our understanding of the processes that shaped our universe.


For more information:

Kraken Achieves Petaflop (R&D Magazine)

NICS (Wikipedia)

Peta- (Wikipedia)

© AQOS / P. Smalley (2009)
Reproduction with attribution is appreciation