The New York Times is reporting that the "Roadrunner," an American military supercomputer, has reached a long-sought-after benchmark by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second. Part of it's insides comes directly out of the Playstation 3.
This (world's fastest?) computer contains 116,640 processor cores, with 12,960 chips that are an improved version of the Cell processor used in the PS3. "The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations," said the New Work Times
"Roadrunner" takes a lot of power.. like enough to power a large mall, and requires three different programming tools since it has three different kinds of processors. Plus all 116,640 processor cores need to stay occupied at once for it to continue running. What a chore.
[NY Times]
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