China's supercomputer is currently the world's fastest: it can run at a sustained 2.5 petaflops (a petaflop is a thousand trillion floating point operations per second) thanks to its 186,368 cores and 229,376GB of RAM.
Jaguar's 224,162 cores come courtesy of a whole bunch of six-core Opteron chips, and its performance is a hefty 1.76 petaflops. Oak Ridge says it's the world's fastest supercomputer for unclassified research.
The first petaflop-scale supercomputer to be designed and built in Europe is pretty fast: "its capacity to transfer information is equivalent to a million people watching high-definition films simultaneously", the press release says.
Built around Intel Xeon 7500 processors, the successor to 2005's Tera 10 is 20 times faster and seven times more energy efficient as its predecessor. It's another nuclear one: Tera-100's mission is to help guarantee the reliability of Europe's nukes.
Can your computing project be handled by a machine with 511 cores? Then don't bother coming to Kraken: it's best suited to jobs that use "at least 512 cores". It's got plenty to spare: the National Institute for Computational Sciences reports that the Cray supercomputer has 112,895 compute cores spread across 9,408 nodes.
Its purpose? To help "solve the world's greatest scientific challenges, such as understanding the fundamentals of matter and unlocking the secrets to the origin of our universe".
Germany's supercomputer was designed for low power consumption as well as high performance, and it's been involved in some interesting projects - including trying to work out how DVDs work. According to Scientific Computing, it's improving our understanding of "the processes involved in writing and erasing a DVD", which should lead to storage media that works better, lasts longer and provides higher capacity.