The National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) is funded by the National Science Foundation and managed by the University of Tennessee. NICS is home to Kraken, the most powerful computer in the world managed by academia and the world's eleventh overall most powerful supercomputer. The NICS petascale scientific computing environment is housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), home to the world's most powerful computing complex. The mission of NICS, a TeraGrid member, is to enable the scientific discoveries of researchers nationwide by providing leading-edge computational resources, together with support for their effective use, and leveraging extensive partnership opportunities. Kraken is a petascale computing environment fully integrated with the TeraGrid with access to the 1.17-petaflop Cray XT5 system containing 18,816 compute sockets and more than 147 terabytes of memory. In November 2009, it was named the third fastest computer in the world. In its final configuration, the XT5 system will deliver in excess of 700 million CPU hours per year.