Kraken is a Cray XT5 supercomputer that entered into full production mode on February 2, 2009. Kraken is operated by the University of Tennessee, making it the most powerful computer in the world managed by academia. It is housed in the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The creation of the Kraken Supercomputer began in 1991 with the establishment of the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences (JICS). JICS is a joint venture between the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Oak Ridge National Laboratory is funded primarily by the Department of Energy, and the JICS facility is one of the only state-owned buildings ever built on the campus of a national laboratory. The main goals of the JICS are to create new ways to simulate and model data using supercomputers and to train future engineers and scientists on the use of these techniques.

The next major event in the establishment of Kraken occurred in the Spring of 2008 when the National Science Foundation awarded the University of Tennessee a $65 Million grant to build and operate a supercomputer in order to aid public research in academia; the grant provided $30 Million for the hardware and $35 Million for the operation of the system. The supercomputer is housed at OLCF and managed by the University of Tennessee's National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS).

Kraken entered full production mode on February 2, 2009 with a speed of 607 TeraFLOPs or 607 trillion calculations per second.In late 2009 Kraken became only the fourth supercomputer ever to perform a PetaFLOP, 1000 trillion calculations per second, and attained its highest position on the list of the world's most powerful supercomputers at 3rd place. Kraken was also the most powerful supercomputer operated by a public university. In late 2010 Kraken had fallen to the 8th place on the list of most powerful supercomputers but was still the most powerful supercomputer operated by academia.

Kraken's hardware currently occupies 2,200 square feet (200 m2) as of January 2011. It runs the Cray Linux Environment, a range of UNIX like operating system variants developed by Cray specifically for supercomputers, with a peak performance of 1.17 PetaFLOPs. Kraken contains 112,896 computing cores (18,816 2.6 GHz six-core AMD Opteron processors) having 147 TB of memory. It has a 3.3 PB raw parallel file system (form of computation in which a large problem is broken down to smaller problems that can be solved simultaneously) of disk storage, of which 2.4 PB are available. It is made up of 9,408 compute nodes, each having two 2.6 GHz six-core AMD Opteron processors, 12 cores, 16 GB of memory and connection via Cray SeaStar2+ router

The software centers on Modules, which allows the user to dynamically modify the user environment using module files. Kraken has a number of compilers available including C/C++ and FORTRAN. There are also a number of software packages available for debugging procedures.

Per NICS, Kraken will be taken offline on April 30, 2014

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