Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Fact Sheet & Background: Roadrunner Smashes the Petaflop Barrier


ARMONK, NY -- 06/09/08 -- In 2006, the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration selected Los Alamos National Laboratory as the development site for Roadrunner and IBM as the computer's designer and builder. Roadrunner, named after the New Mexico state bird, cost about $100 million, and was a three-phase project to deliver the world's first "hybrid" supercomputer -- one powerful enough to operate at one petaflop (one thousand trillion calculations per second). That's twice as fast as the current No.1 rated IBM Blue Gene system at Lawrence Livermore National Lab -- itself nearly three times faster than the leading contenders on the current TOP 500 list of worldwide supercomputers.

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