UT’s CRAY XT5 supercomputer system was initially funded by a $65 million grant to UT from the National Science Foundation. It first entered operation in 2007 and expanded through planned upgrades, which increased its speed and power. In June 2009 it officially became the world’s most powerful academic supercomputer. In October 2009 it was the first academic supercomputer to break the petascale barrier (reaching or exceeding 1 petaflop, which stands for “1 quadrillion floating-point operations per second.”)
It was named for the mythical sea monsters purported to live off the coasts of Norway and Ireland. A Kraken was a many-armed, gargantuan creature that could reach as high as the top of a ship’s main mast with its arms extended but was said to look like an island when motionless.
Kraken was taken out of service in 2014 as work was begun on installing a more up-to-date machine.