While PC users were upgrading to Windows 7 and quad-core processors this fall, Cray and the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge, Tenn., lab upgraded an XT5 supercomputer nicknamed "Jaguar" to more than 224,000 processing cores.

That boosted the Jag to more than two petaflops of computer power and Top 500 list, ranking it the world's fastest supercomputer.

Cray CEO Peter Ungaro, in a news release:

"While we are thrilled to have designed and built a supercomputing system that has broken a number of firsts in the industry, we are most proud of the fact that Jaguar is used day-in and day-out to solve real-world scientific problems at sustained speeds that no other system in the world can match -- including the first two scientific applications in the world ever to break one petaflops in sustained performance."

Maybe they should rename it the Jaguar XKE. It even has a six-cylinder motor like the original XKE -- it's based on AMD Opteron six-core processors.

More from the release:

In 2008, Jaguar became the first high performance computing system to set a new world record for computer speed with sustained performance of over a petaflops (quadrillion mathematical calculations per second) on two scientific applications -- the most critical measure of supercomputing performance.

A petafloptop:

A two petaflop Jaguar - check those chrome headers: