The machine has become the first academic system to surpass a quadrillion floating-point operations per second, or one petaFLOPS. The upgrade also puts the Kraken among the top five supercomputers in the world.
The system came online on 5th October with a peak performance of 1.03 petaFLOPS. It features more than 16,000 six-core 2.6-GHz AMD Istanbul processors with nearly 100,000 compute cores.
It also has 129 terabytes of memory, which doubles the size of Kraken for researchers running some of the world's most sophisticated 3D scientific computing applications.
The boffins who built the beast hope that it will enable academic users to explore problems that were previously inaccessible. These include understanding the mechanism behind the explosion of core-collapse supernovas, how many angels can fit onto the head of a pin and tricky questions such as, "How did Crazy Frog ever get to number one?"
The system is linked to the NSF-supported Teragrid, a network of supercomputers across the US that is the world's largest computational platform for open scientific research.