5: Tianhe-1

563 teraflops



A new entrant into the Top500 list, China's fastest computer proved capable of more than 500 trillion operations per second. Put another way, a simple calculator's power is typically about 10 flops.



Tianhe, which means "river in the sky", is housed at the National Super Computer Center, Tianjin, and is more than four times faster than the previous top computer in the country. The computer combines 6144 Intel processors with 5120 graphics processing units made by AMD, normally found in computer graphics cards.



(Image: Xinhua News Agency/eyevine)

4: Jugene

825 teraflops



At one time the second fastest computer in the world, Jugene at Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Germany, is based on IBM's Blue Gene/P design, which uses many small, low-power chips. Individual processors in this design have a maximum speed of 850 megahertz, slower than the average home computer. But 292,000 chips working together make it the fastest machine in Europe.



This image was taken during an upgrade earlier this year that should allow Jugene to break the 1-petaflop barrier.



(Image: Jülich)

3. Kraken

831 teraflops



Kraken, based at the National Institute for Computational Sciences, funded by the US National Science Federation and located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, has 100,000 dual-core Opteron processors made by AMD, typically used in servers and high-end workstations.



Kraken is the fastest computer in the world owned and operated by an academic institution – the University of Tennessee. In October the foundation awarded the university a further $10 million to build a new computer, Nautilus, to analyse Kraken's output.



(Image: Adam Brimer/Knoxville News Sentinel) Advertisement

This is the most detailed simulation of an earthquake ever done – by Kraken – modelling what would happen should the San Andreas fault in California slip.



It shows how shock waves would spread out across the region after the quake.



(Image: US Geological Survey and the Southern California Earthquake Center)

2. Roadrunner

1042 teraflops, or 1.042 petaflops.



Until this month, this machine was the world's fastest, and had been since June 2008. Roadrunner was the first computer to ever break the 1 petaflop barrier – 1,000,000,000,000,000 calculations per second.



Roadrunner resides at Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico. The computer has an unusual design that combines dual-core processors made by AMD, of a type found in many consumer machines, with the nine-core Cell processor at the heart of Sony's PlayStation 3 games console.



(Image: LANL)

1. Jaguar

1.8 petaflops



Nearly 70 per cent faster than Roadrunner, the US Department of Energy's Jaguar, housed with Kraken at Oak Ridge National Lab, is the newly crowned fastest machine in the world. Oak Ridge houses more computing power than anywhere else on the planet.



Unveiled last year, Jaguar's 181,000 cores only started work this year. Unusually for a world-beating US government-funded machine, this is a civilian computer. The Department of Energy has previously built its fastest machines, such as Roadrunner, to model nuclear explosions.



Much of Jaguar's work is focused on modelling climate change and energy generation, with other basic science such as studies of the structure of water also getting a look-in.



(Image: NCCS)