Ah, But Is It Vista Capable?
by John Paczkowski
Posted on June 18, 2008 at 7:36 AM PT
It’s likely a challenge to program and a bitch to debug, but IBM’s (IBM) new Roadrunner supercomputer is the most powerful in the world. With 12,240 cell processors typically found in Sony’s (SNE) PlayStation 3 console and another 6,562 dual-core AMD (AMD) Opteron chips, Roadrunner has been benchmarked at 1.026 petaflops (1.026 quadrillion calculations per second). And that places it atop the latest Top500 supercomputing ranking as the most powerful computer in the world.
The first computer ever to pass the petaflop milestone, Roadrunner is more than twice as fast as the top-ranked computer in the previous Top500 ranking. It’s also one of the most energy efficient systems on the Top500. But you wouldn’t know from looking at it. It’s housed in the Los Alamos National Laboratory and will be used principally for nuclear weapons simulations.
