The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, $10 million to develop a computer system that will interpret the massive amounts of data created by the current generation of high-performance computers in the agency’s national computer grid.
The University of Tennessee’s supercomputer, Kraken, has broken a major barrier to become the world’s first academic supercomputer to enter the petascale, performing more than 1 thousand trillion operations per second, a landmark achievement.
Kraken, the University of Tennessee’s supercomputer, has passed its early testing and has officially been accepted to begin its designated scientific mission. The machine is expected to address some of humanity’s biggest problems from understanding the changing climate to helping design more effective medicines.
The University of Tennessee’s new supercomputer has entered the ranks of the computing elite by placing 15th on the newly-released Top500 list of the world’s most powerful computers.
