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Roadrunner supercomputer sets records
The Los Alamos National Laboratory's Roadrunner supercomputer operates at the petascale. The prefix "peta" stands for a million billion, also known as a quadrillion. For the Roadrunner supercomputer, operating at petaflop performance means the machine can process a million billion calculations every second.
Earlier this month, Roadrunner surpassed that scale of one quadrillion computations a second, or a petaflop. Two days later it reached a new computing performance record of 1.144 petaflops.
The achievement, said the researchers, opens the door to eventually enabling human-like cognitive performance in electronic computers.
"Roadrunner ushers in a new era for science at Los Alamos National Laboratory," said Terry Wallace, associate director for science, technology and engineering at Los Alamos. "Just a week after formal introduction of the machine to the world, (it was) already doing computational tasks that existed only in the realm of imagination a year ago."
Scientists said Roadrunner, built by the IBM Corp., is the world's first supercomputer to achieve sustained operating performance speeds of one petaflop.
Copyright 2008 by United Press International
This news arrived on: 06/18/2008
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Posted Comments:
06-21-2008 09:20
wrote:
Fascinating! Well, this goes right along with a theory of mine. Not surprising, to hear about this in the New Mexico area. Perfect place for tests like that.
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