Fastest supercomputer in the world

[Humpty]

At only a cool $120 million I might get two!

Roadrunner was always expected to be fast out of the blocks. And after a test run one night in the city of Poughkeepsie, New York, its creators are far from disappointed.

 

Built from microchips originally destined for games consoles, Roadrunner is the world's latest supercomputer. Yesterday it was officially crowned the fastest computer around, having performed a record million billion calculations per second.

 

As an indication of how fast this is, manufacturers explained that if 6 billion people were to do one sum a second on calculator, it would take 46 years to do what RoadRunner could do in a day. The world's first supercomputer, the Cray 1 built in the mid-1970s, would take 1,500 years to finish a calculation that Roadrunner would perform in two hours.

 

David Turek, vice-president of IBM's supercomputing programs, likened Roadrunner to "a very souped-up Sony PlayStation 3". The $120m (?61m) supercomputer was named after New Mexico's state bird, and is more than twice as fast as the previous record holder, another IBM machine called Blue Gene.

 

By harnessing the power of 116,640 processors working in concert, Roadrunner surpassed a milestone in computing power, to enter a new era of what those familiar with such things call petaflop computing. Peta means a million billion, while a flop is a type of calculation.

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[YoKenny]

Roadrunner was always expected to be fast out of the blocks. And after a test run one night in the city of Poughkeepsie, New York, its creators are far from disappointed.

That reminds me of the famous line from the French Connection movie where Popeye Doyle asked Do you still pick your nose in Poughkeepsie?

 

I used to go to Poughkeepsie a lot for training on the large IBM mainframes when its storage was comprised of 64K bits of ferrite doughnuts and the hard drives were large boxes that held 10MB

 

The training was usually 3 months at a time so I got to travel around the area quite a bit visiting the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome and the Catskill Mountains.

[Corona]

That's "pick your feet in Poughkeepsie".

 

I have a friend up there who works for IBM, used to be a member of the Hudson Valley Homebrewers.

[Andavari]

I suppose it needs the cooling power of say Lake Michigan. I can't even imagine the electrical bill to run such a thing. Although it does sound interesting, especially after the one guy deemed it similar to a souped up PS3.

[DennisD]

Calling it Roadrunner might not have been the best idea.

 

Someones bound to try sticking a Wiley Coyote trojan up it's back door.

 

[Andavari]

Calling it Roadrunner might not have been the best idea.

 

Someones bound to try sticking a Wiley Coyote trojan up it's back door.

Good one!