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Oak Ridge Lab Supercomputer Doubles Performance
Anonymous Coward writes "The most powerful supercomputer available for general scientific research in the United States has undergone an upgrade that's doubled its peak performance. The Cray XT3 supercomputer at Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory can now perform up to 54 trillion calculations per second, up from its previous peak of 25 trillion calculations. 'It is probably the fifth-fastest machine' in the world, said Thomas Zacharia, associate laboratory director. 'It is clearly the fastest open-science machine in the U.S. today.'"
Don't whinge to slashdot about it, phone the labs, phoen the school principal, get a few school trips round there organised. I doubt they'll see much (I understand they don't have any flashing lights and spinning tape drives anymore, which is when computers looked like they were big, powerful and doing important stuff) but I'm sure there'll be scientists more than happy to show them something impressive and talk about what they're up to.
I guess they don't call Oak Ridge "the secret city" for nothing, then!