The Worlds Fastest Supercomputer

Roadrunner.

That's the name of the worlds fastest super computer.

Capable of consistently performing 1 petaflop or 1 quadrillion calculations per second, the Roadrunner belongs to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, United States. Bought for USD100million, the Roadrunner will study the decay of nuclear.

In a test run on May 27, the Roadrunner supercomputer, built by IBM with funding from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) for Los Alamos National Laboratory, achieved a long-sought supercomputing goal: performing more than a thousand trillion operations per second, or petaflop/s.

A "flops" is an acronym meaning floating-point operations per second.  One petaflop/s is 1,000 trillion operations per second.  To put this into perspective, if each of the 6 billion people on earth had a hand calculator and worked together on a calculation 24 hours per day, 365 days a year, it would take 46 years to do what Roadrunner would do in one day.

Roadrunner is the first supercomputer to use a hybrid processor architecture, which is based on both Opteron X64 processors from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and the IBM Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell BE) processing elements.

Roadrunner will be housed at NNSA's Los Alamos National Laboratory. The laboratory worked collaboratively with IBM, the manufacturer, for six years to deliver a novel computer architecture that can meet the nation's evolving national security needs.  The result has redefined the frontier of supercomputing, not only by crossing the one petaflop threshold, but also by introducing a new paradigm for the future.

Roadrunner is also rated as very energy efficient (green) (performance/watt)