5. Jaguar
The Jaguar supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., was built by Cray. If the name sounds familiar, that's because Seymour Cray dominated the computing world from the 1960s through the 1980s. His Cray-2 was the fastest computer in the world for four years in the '80s. Earlier this month, Jaguar got a makeover, upping its speed to 260 teraflops. Like many other supercomputers on the list, Jaguar is used to conduct a variety of security and scientific research.
4. Ranger
Unlike the other supercomputers at the top of this list, Ranger is a system intended to be open. Sun Microsystems worked with the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas and a team of academic institutions to build Ranger, which has one-half a petaflop (the next step up from teraflop) capacity. Researchers at academic institutions in the United States whose hearts beat faster at the possibility of crunching "parallel algorithms" and doing "scalable visualization," can submit proposals to have the system run their numbers.
3. BlueGene/P at Argonne
Another Big Blue system is the BlueGene/P at Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill. Argonne, along with Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Lawrence Berkeley, was part of the Manhattan Project, which developed the nuclear bomb in the 1940s. It's the first national laboratory in the country and one of the largest. Argonne still conducts nuclear research, but is also conducting research in environmental management, energy resources, and a variety of scientific fields.
2. BlueGene/L
IBM's BlueGene/L system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., is nothing to sneeze at. It can do 478.2 trillion operations in a second, which it does in collaboration with Los Alamos and Sandia. BlueGene/L can run nuclear computer simulations, replacing underground testing. Thankfully.
1. Roadrunner
Earlier this month, Roadrunner became the first computer ever to reach the one petaflop per second level. Translation: it can do one thousand trillion calculations in the blink of an eye. That's 15 zeroes. That's so fast, even analogies can't touch it. Roadrunner, named after New Mexico's state bird, is operated by Los Alamos National Laboratory. IBM designed and built the record-breaking system, which will be used to do energy, astronomy, climate, human genome research, and to keep the nation's nuclear stockpile safe. Beep-beep.
