The scientific researchers who will use this Cray XT5 system, which was funded through a National Science Foundation grant of $65 million, are working on "the most important problems in the world and they always gravitate to the fastest machines," said Phil Andrews, the NCIS project director.

The machine will be used to study the formation of galaxies, climate change, biology and other sciences, running simulations and often in 3-D.

Kraken is an upgrade from a previous generation, 600 teraflop system, or one trillion floating point operations per second. As part of the upgrade, 16,000 six-core, 2.6-GHz chips by Advanced Micro Devices, were installed. It totals about 100,000 compute cores, spread across 88 cabinets. The previous configuration used AMD's 4 core Barcelona 2.3-GHz chip.

The NCIS system is housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and is managed by the University of Tennessee. Planning for this system began several years ago and, at the time, Andrews said they had no real way of knowing just how fast this machine would be because of the uncertainties of chip clock speeds.

But, Andrews said, "We were hoping for a petaflop."