IBM has designed a new $100 million supercomputer, called "Roadrunnner," that's powerful enough to operate at 1 petaflop -- a cool 1 thousand trillion calculations per second. That's twice as fast as the next closest supercomputer -- the IBM Blue Gene system -- and nearly three times as fast as other top supercomputers in the world. For those who aren't sure what a thousand trillion calculations per second equates to, it's also 1 million billion calculations per second -- or 1 quadrillion calculations per second.
June 09th 2008