The U.S. Department of Energy, along with IBM made the announcement on Monday that the Roadrunner supercomputer has managed to break a record, executing over 1,000 trillion floating point operations per second.
The Roadrunner is capable of executing over 1 quadrillion floating point operations per second, also known as 1 petaflop.
The $100 million supercomputer is twice as fast as the current record holder, IBM’s Blue Gene system at the Lawrence National Lab.
The Roadrunner is going to be used to give calculations for nuclear security, as well as scientific research.
It will be held at the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Los Alamos National Laboratory.
It will span 6,000 square feet and weigh in at 500,000 pounds.
It combines 12,960 IBM Cell chips, used in the Sony PS3.
It also has 7,000 dual-core AMD Opteron chips and 80 terabytes of memory, running on Red Hat Linux.