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Roadrunner – The fastest supercomputer in the world

By on June 19th, 2008

Roadrunner - The fastest supercomputer in the world!

According to CNN, researchers at IBM made public the fastest supercomputer in the world, worth 100 million dollars. In a demonstration that took place on Monday, the supercomputer named Roadrunner made a million billion calculus per second, proving in this way that it deserves the title of worlds fastest computer on the planet.

The computer took 6 years to be developed by the engineers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and those at IBM Corp., and it’s meant to be used mainly for operations that involve nuclear weapons, including nuclear explosion simulations.

Roadrunner is twice as fast as the Blue Gene model, also developed by IBM, that is approximative 3 times faster than all the supercomputers in the world.

Roadrunner - The worlds fastest supercomputer

Aside from the usage in the nuclear domain, the developers assigned many other uses, saying that Roadrunner could have applications in the civilian domains such as medicine or science, from developing of new ecological fuels to developing pollution efficient cars or finding new medicine drugs and therapy.

The IBM engineers showed just how fast the Roadrunner is with a parallel: if all the 6 billion people would have a pocket calculator and they would work 24h a day on it, it would take them about 46 years to complete all the calculus that Roadrunner would do in a single day!

Roadrunner - The worlds fastest supercomputer

Such a computer takes up a lot of space. It weighs approximatively 225 tones and it occupies some 557 square meters. Some 92 km of optic fiber, 7000 dual-core processors and a 80TB memory make the supercomputer.

Roadrunner - The worlds fastest supercomputer