IBM working on Roadrunner supercomputer

IBM working on Roadrunner supercomputer

IBM already holds the distinction of making the fastest computer in the world named BlueGene/L which is currently present at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories.

They now plan to develop a faster supercomputer codenamed Roadrunner which they believe would be several times faster than BlueGene/L.

Roadrunner would be built for the Department of Energy and would require space equal to three basketball courts.

IBM plans to use as many as 16,000 Cell processors and more than 16,000 AMD Opteron microprocessors.

Incidentally, Cell is the same processor, which is being used by Sony in their upcoming Playstation 3 gaming console and is considered to be the fastest processor used till now in a gaming platform.

IBM expects this upcoming machine to achieve peak performance of 1.6 petaflops, or 1,600 trillion calculations per second.