First there was the gigaflop, then there was the teraflop, now we have the petaflop. Finally the one thousand trillion calculations per second barrier has been broken.
How was this feat achieved, well we have the PlayStation 3 to thank for it. This new machine is now twice as fast as its closest competitor, which is built by IBM.
The IBM machine, codenamed ‘Roadrunner’ will be used to monitor the US nuclear stockpile.
So what does Roadrunner run on?
Well unlike its slower cousin, it will not be running on 212 992 conventional processors but rather 12 000 Cell processors, each running at 4GHz and 7 000 conventional processors.
Not only will this juggernaut of a super computer be counting nuclear bombs, but it will also be used to help with research into astronomy, genomics, and climate change.
Michael Reed
