IBM to Build World's Fastest Supercomputer

IBM (NYSE: IBM) is building a supercomputer capable of petaflop performance -- 1,000 trillion, or a quadrillion, calculations per second -- for the U.S. Department of Energy using a combination of more than 30,000 Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE) and AMD (NYSE: AMD) Opteron processors.
The new supercomputer, dubbed "Roadrunner," will be built for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) at the DOE's Los Alamos National Laboratory and represents the first use of the Cell processors -- the chips at the core of the next-generation Sony (NYSE: SNE) Playstation 3 gaming console -- in a supercomputer.

The system, which will take up approximately three basketball courts of space, will run on the Linux operating system and will be used for ultra high-performance computing (HPC) applications and problem-solving, including nuclear weapons simulation and life sciences research, according to IBM. Click Here to Read More