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Photos: The world's fastest supercomputers revealed
Bigger, faster, stronger

By Nick Heath

Published: Monday 17 November 2008

The only other computer to break the petaflop barrier was the Cray XT5 supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, known as Jaguar.

The Cray XT5 system, seen here, is made up of 37,544 quadcore AMD Opteron processors with 300TB of memory.

The machine will be used for everything from predicting the dynamics of climate change to understanding the complex interactions of proteins inside the body.

Both of the top two systems are housed at national laboratories operated by the US Department of Energy (DOE).

Photo credit: National Center for Computational Sciences