An American supercomputer has been named as the world's fastest [3]. Titan, which resides at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee (and is an upgrade of the 2009 winner, Jaguar), has catapulted its way to the top spot in six short months. Now, for the first time in three years, the U.S. holds the top two spots, with Titan and the IBM machine Sequoia.

Titan is made up from a mixture of Nvidia's CPUs and Tesla GPUs and operates at 17.59 petaflops per second--meaning it can make 17,590 trillion calculations per second. It will be used to research biofuels, develop greener vehicle engines, and calculate climate change.

[Image from Wikipedia [4]]