US army super computer breaks proecessing speed record

An American military supercomputer has broken the quadrillion calculations a second petaflop barrier, becoming twice as fast as the previous front runner, IBM's Bluegene/L. The machine uses 12,960 Cell processors - originally developed for the Sony Playstation 3 - together with a handful of AMD Opterons, giving a grand total of 116,640 processor cores.

Roadrunner was built as a joint venture by IBM and Los Alamos Laboratories and can do in a day what it would take the entire population of the planet 46 years to accomplish, working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, we are assured.

Los Alamos National Laboratory, based in New Mexico, will use Roadrunner on secret military projects such as simulating nuclear explosions, which is a lot safer than letting real ones off. But before it starts working on big bangs, the computer will be let loose on research into climate change.

Roadrunner has a pretty large impact on global warming itself, consuming three megawatts of power.

After breaking the petaflop barrier, engineers are now scratching their heads and looking wistfully at the exaflop, the zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraflop