IBM delivered the , a $100 million system, last year for Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Kraken is part of the , an NSF project that links high performance systems used in research, so getting research time on this machine isn't easy.

Proposals for compute time are reviewed by a peer review board that meets four times a year, and follow a process that's similar to submitting an article to a prestigious journal. Among the things researchers have to show before they can run their jobs is that their applications can scale to the system's capabilities.

Any supercomputer's useful life is roughly three to four years, said Andrews. "It's not like it is not useful after that, but it's no longer state of the art," he said.

Kraken's speed allows greater resolution or finer analysis of scientific models. A slower machine you may be modeling the earth at 10 kilometer resolution, but a faster machine may take that resolution to as much as 5 kilometers. "That's important because some effects only manifest themselves at smaller resolutions," said Andrews.