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Roadrunner Supercomputer Breaks the Petaflop Barrier

At 3:30 a.m. on May 26, 2008, Memorial Day, the “Roadrunner” supercomputer exceeded a sustained speed of 1 petaflop/s, or 1 million billion calculations per second. The sustained performance makes Roadrunner more than twice as fast as the current number 1 system on the TOP500 list. The best sustained performance to date is 74.5% efficiency, 1.026 petaflop/s.

“Petaflop/s” is computer jargon—peta signifying the number 1 followed by 15 zeros (sometimes called a quadrillion) and flop/s meaning “double-precision floating point operations per second.” Los Alamos held the fastest supercomputer title in 1993 with the Thinking Machines CM-5, and inaugurated the supercomputer era, assisting in the development of the
Cray-1 in 1976. The Laboratory and IBM go all the way back to the first card-programmable calculators, used at Los Alamos in 1949. Los Alamos also housed serial number 1 of the IBM 704 in 1956.

The Roadrunner supercomputer, developed by IBM in partnership with the Laboratory and the National Nuclear Security Administration, uses commercially available hardware, including aspects of commercial game console and graphics technologies. Because of its off-the-shelf components, the computer costs significantly less than a one-of-a-kind machine. It also uses a Linux operating system.

http://www.lanl.gov/roadrunner