You can't beat Roadrunner, IBM's $100M supercomputer

[Trainspotter 0]

You can't beat Roadrunner, IBM's $100M supercomputer

WASHINGTON - Scientists unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer Sunday, a $100 million machine that for the first time has performed 1,000 trillion calculations per second in a sustained exercise.

 

The technology breakthrough was accomplished by engineers from Los Alamos National Laboratory and IBM Corp. on a computer to be used primarily on nuclear weapons work, including simulating nuclear explosions.

 

Officials said the computer, named Roadrunner, also could have a wide range of other applications in civilian engineering, medicine and science, from developing biofuels and designing more fuel-efficient cars to finding drug therapies and providing services to the financial industry.

 

To put the computer's speed in perspective, it has roughly the computing power of 100,000 of today's most powerful laptops stacked 1.5 miles high, according to IBM.

 

Or, if each of the world's 6 billion people worked on hand-held computers for 24 hours a day, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can do in a single day.

 

From: - June 10, 2008

[metsfan 2]

Now if only they could make it cost 100 dollars.

 

- Andy

[East New York 4,103]

1,000 trillion is 1 zillion right???

[metsfan 2]

1,000 trillion is 1 zillion right???

 

No, that's not a real number.

 

- Andy

[R1Toasty 0]

The super computer runs at over 1 PetaFLOPS (1,000 trillion Floating Point Operations Per Second)... if only I could afford one of those (better start playing the lottery) :cool:.

 

PS, quadrillion is after trillion.