Kraken (supercomputer)
| Company type | Supercomputing system |
|---|---|
| Industry | High-performance computing |
| Founded | February 2, 2009 |
| Defunct | April 30, 2014 |
| Headquarters | Oak Ridge , United States |
Area served | Academic research |
Key people | University of Tennessee (management) |
| Products | Cray XT5 supercomputer |
Kraken was a Cray XT5 supercomputing system that commenced full-scale operations on February 2, 2009. Managed by the University of Tennessee, it held the distinction of being the most powerful academic supercomputer during its time. Located at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility within Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Kraken was officially retired on April 30, 2014.
History
The inception of Kraken can be linked to 1991 with the establishment of the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences (JICS), a partnership between the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. JICS is dedicated to enhancing simulation and modeling capabilities through supercomputing, as well as providing education and training for engineers and scientists in these fields.
In early 2008, the National Science Foundation granted the University of Tennessee $65 million—allocating $30 million for hardware acquisition and $35 million for operational expenses—to develop and oversee a supercomputer aimed at supporting academic research. The machine was housed at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility and administered by the University's National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS).
Upon entering production, Kraken delivered a computational speed of 607 teraFLOPS (trillions of floating-point operations per second). By the end of 2009, it became the fourth system worldwide to exceed one petaFLOP (1,000 trillion calculations per second), ranking third globally and maintaining its position as the most powerful supercomputer operated by a public university. Although its ranking fell to eighth place by late 2010, Kraken continued to be recognized as the leading academic supercomputing resource.
The system was decommissioned on April 30, 2014.
Hardware/Software
As of January 2011, Kraken occupied approximately 2200 square feet and ran on the Cray Linux Environment, a UNIX-like operating system engineered by Cray specifically for high-performance computing platforms. It achieved a peak computational capability of 1.17 petaFLOPS, powered by 112,896 CPU cores derived from 18,816 six-core AMD Opteron processors clocked at 2.6 GHz, complemented by 147 terabytes of memory. Storage was provided through a raw parallel file system with a capacity of 2.4 petabytes. The architecture consisted of 9,408 compute nodes, each equipped with two six-core AMD Opteron processors at 2.6 GHz, supported by 16 GB of memory and interconnected via Cray’s SeaStar2+ network router.