Kraken are legendary sea monsters said to have lived in the Scandinavian waters between Norway and Iceland. This sea monster made its first appearance in the movie Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
The scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee launched the Kraken: a supercomputer monster, the first academic supercomputer to break the petaflops barrier. The flops or flop/s is a measure of computer’s performance and stands for FLoating point Operations Per Second.

The Kraken is based on the Cray XT5 model that was renovated and the system consists of 16,000 x 2.6 GHz processors with 16 cores and 129 Terabyte memory. When the system was started this week, it set a record of 1,03×10¹⁵ flops performing more than 1 thousand trillion operations per second, a huge achievement in the academic research environment.