Cray XT Jaguar: World’s Fastest Computer

According to Wired Science, the U.S. Department of Energy is about to give scientist more time for open research on two of its largest supercomputers. Scientists will have an additional 1.3 billion hours of processor hours available for complex simulations and computations. One of these supercomputers is the Cray XT Jaguar, located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

The Jaguar was named the world’s fasted supercomputer for unclassified use in late 2008. Under the hood it has 45,000 quad-core AMD Opteron processors and 362 tetrabytes of memory, and is capable of processing 1.64 petaflops, which translates to 1.64 quadrillion mathematical calculations per second. The Jaguar’s price tag is about $100 million.

You can see a cool time-lapse video of the Jaguar computer being built here.