Newsletters Welcome, Guest Log In | Register

Subscribe

Sign up now and get the best business technology insights direct to your inbox.

  • Daily Edge
  • CTO Edge Update
  • Business Tools & Templates
  • Aligning IT & Business Goals
  • Maximizing IT Investments

0

New King of the Supercomputers

Posted by Susan Hall Jun 9, 2008 10:12:46 AM

A supercomputer built with components designed for the Sony PlayStation 3 has dethroned IBM's Blue Gene/L as the world's fastest supercomputer, reports The New York Times.

 

The $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner, has crossed the petaflop barrier, having been shown to process more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second. It's twice as fast as the recently upgraded Blue Gene/L, housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which runs at a speed of 478.2 teraflops, using 212,992 processors.

 

Roadrunner, built by engineers and scientists from IBM and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, uses fewer than 20,000 chips, according to BBC News. It uses both conventional processors and modified eight-core "cell" chips originally designed for the PS3, which run at speeds greater than 4 GHz.

 

With several machines in the works designed to run at petaflop speeds, this machine might be the world's fastest only a short time, the BBC notes.

Add a comment Leave a comment on this blog post.

There are no comments on this post

Budget & Finance Toolkit for IT - 2010 Edition

Download a comprehensive collection of templates, forms, instruction and advice that will help you to plan and submit your 2010 IT Budget.

Learn more >

Windows 7 Upgrade Project Kit

Moving to Windows 7? The Windows 7 Upgrade Project Kit is the ideal support tool for managing all phases of an organizational upgrade to Windows 7. The tools and templates in this kit will help you develop a strategy and map out the implementation tactics which link your Windows 7 deployment to your company's bottom line.

Learn more >

Protecting Your Online Channels and Web Applications

This white paper gives a broad overview of some of the ways that organizations can bolster the security of their Web-based assets.

The 8 Benefits of Adopting SFA

This checklist provides a list of the benefits sales force automation (SFA) brings; if three or four address pain points in your company, then you're probably ready to bring SFA into your organization.

Tape Storage

Disaster recovery and business continuation that includes encryption, all at a manageable TCO.

Cost-Effective Business Software

Business solutions software that reduce costs, improve operational performance, decrease risk, and strengthen business management processes.

Application Grid

Learn more about this middleware layer that pools and dynamically provisions infrastruction application delivery resources to lower costs and improve efficiency.

Database Management

Data management tips and techniques that insure ease of access, comprehensive security and absolute privacy for your invaluable company information.