Roadrunner - Million dollar calculator, speed record

On Monday (June 9), IBM scientists announced the supercomputer reached a record speed of 1 million billion calculations per second (petaflop) at a price of $ 100 million. This is the first computer to achieve this 'devil speed' .

Roadrunner, the masterpiece that is stunned by the tech world, is coordinated by engineers at Los Alamos National Laboratory and IBM Corporation to be used for nuclear-related research. simulating explosions .

The computer, called the Roadrunner pheasant, featured in New Mexico (USA), has twice the speed of IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (USA) and is three times faster. Super computer properties are available today.

Talking about Roadrunner's processing speed, IBM made the following comparison: "If there are 6 billion people working continuously 24 hours a day, it will take 46 years for them to complete the work that Roadrunner only It takes exactly one day to complete. The performance is equivalent to the 100,000 most advanced laptops today. "

'With the speed of' devil ', Roadrunner allowed to solve great problems in a moment' , said Thomas D'Agostino , head of the Nuclear Security Agency (USA).

However, engineers say this super product can be applied flexibly and extensively in: civil engineering, medicine and other sciences.

Roadrunner - million dollar supercomputer, record speed.(Photo: AP)

The computer weighs 227 tons, sits on an area of ​​1,828.8 m² with 57m of fiber optic cable, made up of 6,948 dual-core chips and the memory capacity of up to 80 trillion bytes is priced at 100 million USD.

Roadrunner is located at IBM's Laboratory in Poughkeepsie State, New York (USA) will move to a new home - Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico state (USA) next month.

"Not only involved in weapons research and nuclear warheads, Roadrunner is also responsible for ensuring the safety and security of US weapons reserves," D'Agostino said.

In addition, this supercomputer is also expected to be available soon in other laboratories, not only the US but also in other countries with useful applications for studying vaccine development. anti-HIV virus, cellulose ethanol production, or as to understand the origin of the universe. With the ability to save electricity (implementing 376 million calculations / W), this is considered the " most energy-hungry" compared to other supercomputers today.

'This is a great achievement that IBM devotes to technology,' said David Turek, vice president of IBM's Supercomputing program at a news conference with reporters.