Roadrunner Military Supercomputer Sets Processing RecordS
Roadrunner, the IBM supercomputer at Los Alamos National
Laboratory in New Mexico, manages 1.026 quadrillion calculations
per seconds, also known as a Petaflop. Twice as fast as IBM's
Blue Gene/L, the previous World's Fastest, the Roadrunner—also
from the House of IBM, will be used, once classified, to solve
military problems—such as making sure our proud nation's nuclear
weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. Until
classification, however, it will be used for important
scientific problems, such as how I can get more shoes in my
closet climate change.  Designed from video game components, and
costing $133 million, Roadrunner contains 12,960 chips
redesigned from an I.B.M. Cell microprocessor that was
originally created for Sony's PlayStation 3 video-game machine.
Add to that a bunch of Opteron processors from Advance Micro
Devices, which are commonly found in corporate servers, and
there's your supercomputer.  It runs on around three meg