IBM has won a contract to build what could become the world's fastest supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, using the processor developed for PlayStation 3, which is due out in November.
The "Roadrunner" computer has the potential to reach a sustained speed of one petaflop, or up to 1,000 trillion calculations per second, according to a news release from the U.S. Department of Energy.
The National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the lab, and lab officials will analyze the development of the supercomputer to determine whether to expand it to achieve the petaflop goal.
John Hopson, the lab's program director for simulation and computing, said the primary use for the new system will be to monitor the nuclear weapons stockpile.
Since the United States no longer conducts nuclear testing, much of the monitoring is done using computer simulations.
"We depend a great deal on computational science to provide the final stamp of approval that the weapons stockpile is safe, secure and reliable," Hopson said.
The Roadrunner will use special purpose microprocessors, called IBM 's "Cell Broadband Engine" chips. The computer will be housed in a space the size of three basketball courts, according to an IBM news release.
The fastest supercomputer, IBM's Blue Gene/L, is now located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, Hopson said.
But IBM says that when complete, the Roadrunner would be nearly four times faster than Lawrence Livermore's supercomputer.
IBM will begin shipping the new supercomputer to Los Alamos later this year. The installation should be complete in 2008.
A petaflop is a measure of a computer's processing speed and can be expressed as a thousand trillion floating point operations per second.
FLOPS are floating-point operations per second. Floating-point is considered to be a method of encoding real numbers within the limits of finite precision available on computers.
Using floating-point encoding, extremely long numbers can be handled relatively easily. A floating-point number is expressed as a basic number, an exponent, and a number base which is usually ten but may also be 2.
To get a perspective on how far we are from a petaflop machine (1 quadrillion mathematical computations per second), the world's fastest supercomputer today, the Blue Gene Supercomputer in Livermore, California, has a top speed of 360 trillion operations a second.
Scientists predict we will see a petaflop computer by the year 2010, others claim it could be as early as 2006.
Japan's Earth Simulator supercomputer shocked Washington a few years ago and many believed that the United States could lose its lead in many areas, just as it did in climate science.
The Earth Simulator Center reportedly negotiated deals with Japanese automakers to use time on the world's fastest computer to boost their quality and productivity; that's when the race became heated!
IBM developed the Blue Gene computer in 2004 which may not hold the lead if reports are accurate; Its said that Japan is working on a petaflop computer that can operate 10 quadrillion calculations per second (10 petaflops). This petaflop computer would be over 70 times as fast as the Blue Gene and could run $750 million dollars.
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