Beep. Beep. Make way for Roadrunner — the world’s fastest computer. The U.S. Department of Energy announced today that the IBM-built machine, which will be housed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, has broken the petaflop barrier. That’s geek speak for the number of calculations the computer’s processors are capable of performing — 1,000 trillion operations per second in the case of Roadrunner. In today’s news release, the Energy Department described it this way:

 

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.

 

Roadrunner achieves this feat using the same technology that benefits video gamers — microprocessors originally developed for Sony’s PlayStation 3.



LANL, which is charged with ensuring that the country’s nuclear weapons work without underground testing, uses complex supercomputer simulations to certify the weapons stockpile. But U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, who takes credit for securing much of the funding for the project, said the computer will also be a valuable tool for other kinds of science, including climate change, biology and physics research.



Congress provided $35 million in 2006 and NNSA added another $6 million to get the project off the ground. Congress has since approved nearly $60 million for the project, and this year’s budget request seeks another $26 million for the Roadrunner system, according to Domenici’s office, which heralds Roadrunner as the "fastest earmark in the world."