World's fastest supercomp for science

The Cray XT, called Jaguar, has been ranked first in the list of the world's top 500 computers, released at an annual international supercomputing conference in Austin on Tuesday.

"This accomplishment is the culmination of our vision to regain leadership in high performance computing and harness its potential for scientific investigation. I am especially gratified because we make this machine available to the entire scientific community through an open and transparent process that has resulted in spectacular scientific results ranging from the human brain to the global climate to the origins of the Universe," said Undersecretary for Science Raymond L Orbach.

Thom Mason, the Director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said that the real value of the machine would be measured by the scientific breakthroughs that would be achieved in the future.