For those who haven't seen the news story today, IBM have released the details of their new 'Worlds Fastest Super Computer'.
It's called the 'Roadrunner' and can perform at 1 petaflop (1,000 trillion calculations per second)! It uses both AMD Opteron and Cell CPU's (PowerXCell 8i) which are based on those in the PS3 - although a slightly newer version. There are 6,948 dual core AMD Opteron's and 12,960 Cell CPUs on blade servers. The Cell CPU's improve the floating point calculations of the Opteron's by 25 times (2500%). It also has 80 terrabytes of memory.
In IBM's press release they say:
"Roadrunner's petaflop performance is roughly equivalent to the combined computing power of 100,000 of today's fastest laptop computers. That's a stack of laptops 1.5 miles high. It would take the entire population of the earth -- about 6 billion people – each working a handheld calculator at the rate of one second per calculation, more than 46 years to do what Roadrunner can do in one day."
If anyone wants one it will only set you back $50 million, so start saving now
Chart data provided with kind permission from
ELSPA