The world's first hybrid supercomputer has broken through the "petaflop barrier" of 1,000 trillion operations per second, according to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The machine was designed by IBM and uses Cell Broadband Engine chips—originally developed for video game platforms—in conjunction with x86 processors from AMD.
The supercomputer was designed and developed for the DOE and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) under the DOE/LANL project name "Roadrunner." (The Roadrunner project was named after the state bird of New Mexico.) Later this summer, it will be dismantled at IBM's Poughkeepsie, New York, plant and loaded onto 21 tractor trailer trucks for delivery to the Los Alamos facility.
Roadrunner is twice as fast as the world-leading Blue Gene, which is itself three times more powerful than the remaining contenders on the industry's Top500 list of supercomputers. This new claimant to the title of world's fastest supercomputer has the computing power of 100,000 of today's most powerful laptops—or a stack of such laptops one and a half miles high.
Although most of their early applications are for government and academic purposes, supercomputers as a category are moving rapidly to business uses. Their capability improves by a factor of 1000 every decade, propelling the global economy as more business sectors begin to ride the industry's advantageous price/performance curve.
| System Name | Roadrunner |
| Site | |
| System Family | IBM Cluster |
| System Model | BladeCenter QS22 Cluster |
| Computer | BladeCenter QS22/LS21 Cluster, PowerXCell 8i 3.2 Ghz / Opteron DC 1.8 GHz, Voltaire Infiniband |
| Vendor | IBM |
| Application area | US Nuclear |
| Installation Year | 2009 |
| | |
| Operating System | Linux |
| Interconnect | |
| Processor | PowerXCell 8i 3200 MHz (12.8 GFlops) |
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