A military computer designed to run virtual nuclear weapons tests has set a new speed record in America and comes from IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).
The IBM machine has been built using components designed for Sony’s Playstation 3 and has been named Roadrunner. It has beaten all records set by other computers by processing more than one thousand trillion calculations per second. To put this into some perspective, the calculations that this one computer can do in one day would take the entire world’s population a total of 46 years to do with a standard computer.
This doubles the speed of the last record set by BlueGene, also from IBM and all thanks to the ‘cell’ chip. This chip runs at a speed greater that 4 GHz and has been modified by IBM. 12,960 of these chips have been installed into the supercomputer as accelerators or boosters.
At £67 million I don’t think we’ll all be popping out for one. At least, not while utilities are the price they are at the moment as this computer needs the same amount of power that would normally run a large shopping centre.
Three separate programming tools using three different types of processors are needed and all 116, 640 processor cores need to be occupied simultaneously to run correctly.
The initial intention is that the computer will be used to work out complex nuclear problems and may be utilised at a later date to help with scientific problems such as climate change so at least once we’ve worked out how to blow each other up we can then work out how to put it all back together again!
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