Roadrunner, the World’s Fastest Supercomputer

The world’s fastest computer so far is now unveiled in Washington. This machine can perform 1,000 trillion calculations per second in a sustained exercise and is expected to be utilized on nuclear weapons work that includes simulating nuclear explosions. It also allows the users to solve different tremendous problems in no time. Roadrunner could also be found useful in civilian engineering, medicine and science, financial industries plus a lot more. This $100 million machine called Roadrunner, was engineered and accomplished by Los Alamos National Laboratory and the IBM group.

This very fast computer is the fruit of six years of combined hard work of IBM and Alamos. The Roadrunner is twice as fast as the Blue Gene system of IBM which is three times faster than the other existing supercomputers.

Some elements of this supercomputer can be traced back to the popular video games. It is described as “a very souped-up Sony PlayStation 3”. The basic chip design of the PS is taken and enhanced the capability and came up with the Roadrunner. However, we should note that the Roadrunner is not a video game.

The interconnecting of Roadrunner occupies an area of 6,000 square feet, weighs 500,000 pounds with 57 miles of fiber optics. The fastest supercomputer is made from commercial parts yet it consists of 6,948 dual core computer chips and 12,960 cell engines with a whopping 80 terabytes of memory.

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