We wrote about the latest supercomputer creation from Seattle-based Cray a few weeks ago, and now it’s official: Titan is the world’s fastest computer.

Titan, an open science computer located at the U.S Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, took first place in the Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers that was released today at the SC12 supercomputing show in Salt Lake City, Utah.

The Cray XK7 system hit a performance of 17.59 petaflops, which is essentially quadrillions of calculations per second. The system has 560,640 processors, including 261,632 of Nvidia’s Tesla K20x GPU accelerators. It runs Advanced Micro Device’s Opteron 6274 processors.

Previously named Jaguar, which ranked as the world’s fastest computer on the Top500 lists in November 2009 and June 2010, Titan should help U.S. research related to critical topics like climate change, biofuels and nuclear energy. The update is a major upgrade over Jaguar, and according to CNN, Titan can deliver 10 times the performance and is five times more energy efficient than its predecessor.

Titan bumped IBM’s Sequoia to second on the Top500 list, which is released twice a year. Sequoia ranked first in the June 2012 rankings, marking the first time a supercomputer from the U.S. topped the list in more than three years.

On Friday, Cray announced a net loss of $5.2 million for the third quarter, an improvement from the net loss of $12.2 million in the third quarter of last year. The company’s business results tend to vary widely quarter-by-quarter, depending largely on big contracts for supercomputer installations.

Previously on GeekWire: Supercomputer deal: Crazy to acquire Appro for $25M

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