IBM's Roadrunner flies at one petaflop

US nuclear safety lab to get world's fastest supercomputer

IBM is building what it claims is the world's fastest super computer, capable of operating at one petaflop (one thousand trillion calculations per second).

The machine has been nicknamed "Roadrunner", after the state bird of New Mexico, where it will reside. The system will be installed at the US Department of Energy's Los Alamos laboratory.

The system runs on Red Hat Linux using 6,948 dual core AMD x86 Opteron processors, has 80 terabytes of memory, occupies 6,000 square feet and weighs 500,000lbs. Twenty one tractor trailer trucks will be needed to transport it to Los Alamos later this summer.

Roadrunner's primary use will be in nuclear weapons safety and reliability. IBM also claimed Roadrunner would deliver world-leading energy efficiency, as it is capable of making 376 million calculations per watt – a neat way of explaining that it needs an eye-popping 3.9 megawatts of power to operate.