Watson's culinary concoctions were served up from an IBM food truck at a tech conference in Las Vegas last week. Next stop: Austin. / IBM Research/Flickr hide caption
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The Cray-built Titan, at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, comes in second. Jason K. Richards/Oak Ridge National Laboratories hide caption
Oceans, and the innards of Earth itself, are the final frontiers of our planet. Expect amazing discoveries as explorers document more and more of this unseen realm. Hulton Archive/Getty Images hide caption
Shwetak Patel (foreground), a MacArthur Fellow, recognized that every device in a home has a unique signature that can be used to track energy usage. The data collected by Patel's system showed that digital video recorders were responsible for 11 percent of this home's power use, just one example of The Human Face of Big Data. © Peter Menzel 2012/from The Human Face of Big Data hide caption
Cray employees put the finishing touches on Titan at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The supercomputer may be the world's fastest. It's designed to do 20 petaflops — or 20,000 trillion calculations — each second. It consumes enough electricity to power a small city of 9,000 people. Courtesy of Nvidia hide caption