Department of Energy’s supercomputer breaks petraflop barrier

In a historical first, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) supercomputer has broken through the landmark barrier of one petaflop--or one quadrillion floating point operations per second. The feat was achieved by DOE's Roadrunner supercomputer last month, and announced at the International Supercomputing Conference yesterday afternoon.

Roadrunner is built by IBM with a hybrid of 12,960 modified Cell processors--used in Sony's PlayStation 3 console--and 6,912 Opteron processors from chip maker AMD. It was designed to perform calculations to certify the reliability of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, without the need to conduct underground tests.

Barring a surprise, last-minute entrant, the new record will put Roadrunner at the No. 1 position on the TOP500 supercomputer list.  The significance of the win is apparent when you compare it to former No. 1 BlueGene/L, with just 0.48 petaflops per second.

For more about the Roadrunner supercomputer:
- check out this BetaNews article