A NEW supercomputer is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the I.B.M. BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The new $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference to the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers and scientists at IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory, based in Los Alamos, N.M. Assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, the Roadrunner has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second. It will be used principally to solve classified military problems to ensure that America's stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. The Roadrunner will simulate the behavior of the weapons in the first fraction of a second during an explosion. To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D'Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day. The high-performance computing goal, known as a petaflop — one thousand trillion calculations per second — has long been viewed as a crucial milestone by military, technical and scientific organizations in the US, as well as a growing group including Japan, China and the European Union. All view supercomputing technology as a symbol of national economic competitiveness. The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an IBM Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony's PlayStation 3 video-game machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations, the New York Times reported Having surpassed the petaflop barrier, IBM is already looking toward the next generation of supercomputing – the United States' supercomputer industry has been able to sustain a pace of continuous performance increases, improving a thousandfold in processing power in 11 years. The next thousandfold goal is the exaflop, which is a quintillion calculations per second, followed by the zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraflop.
