Tags: AMD, Cell Broadband Engine, IBM, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Roadrunner, Sony Playstation 3, Supercomputers

IBM develops Roadrunner supercomputer for US Department of Energy

The U.S. Department of Energy has announced their plans to use a new supercomputer named Roadrunner which they claim is the fastest of its kind in the world.

Roadrunner has been developed by IBM and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. It would be used to simulate U.S. nuclear-weapons performance.

This new machine costs around $100 million and is capable of processing at 1.5 petaflops. This makes it three times faster than the largest supercomputer currently in use.

IBM claims that this new supercomputer has the computing power of 100,000 of today’s most powerful laptops.

IBM Vice President David Turek added: “At its center are very conventional kinds of microprocessors from AMD — the kinds of microprocessors that you’ll find in laptops and servers. But surrounding this are a large number of chips known as a Cell Broadband Engine — the same kind of chips that you find in the Sony PlayStation 3.”