August 1, 2012

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The only method for judging a planet's size is to compare it to the star it's orbiting. This is exactly what Kraken is enabling a team led by Travis Metcalfe of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, to do.  Kraken, a Cray XT5 supercomputer capable of more than a petaflop (a thousand trillion calculations per second) is enabling the team to measure properties such as radius, mass, age, and bulk composition, or the proportions of individual gases throughout the star. Full Story

Source
University of Tennessee, National Institute for Computational Sciences

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