Breaks one petaflop barrier
The Roadrunner high-performance computer at the Laboratory is now the fastest in the world. The computer, developed in partnership with IBM and housed at the Laboratory, reached a petaflop of sustained performance.
"This enormous accomplishment is the most recent example of how the U.S. Department of Energy's world-renowned supercomputers are strengthening national security and advancing scientific discovery," DOE Secretary Samuel Bodman said in a news release today. "Roadrunner will not only play a key role in maintaining the U.S. nuclear deterrent, it also will contribute to solving our global energy challenges, and open new windows of knowledge in the basic scientific research fields."
A "flop" is an acronym meaning floating-point operations per second. One petaflop is 1,000 trillion operations per second. To put this into perspective, if each of the 6 billion people on Earth had a hand calculator and worked together on a calculation 24 hours per day, 365 days a year, it would take 46 years to do what Roadrunner would do in one day.
Click here to view a QuickTime movie on Roadrunner.
Read the DOE news release.
Read a statement from New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici.
Read a statement from New Mexico Representative Tom Udall.
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