IBM has a supercomputer that breaks the Petaflop barrier (1.026 quadrillion calculations per seconds). Built from video game components and costing $133 million, the supercomputer, known as Roadrunner, will be used by the military once classified.
Roadrunner contains 12,960 cell chips and a number of Advanced Micro Devices Opteron processors. It runs on about 3 megawatts of power, and it takes three separate programming tools to write the code for it. Reportedly the difficult part in writing the code is keep all 116,640 processor cores occupied simultaneously, maximizing Roadrunner's capability.
Reports have came in that the Roadrunner supercomputer can play Quake 7 full screen with very little slowdown in an action scene. Okay, so I was kidding about the last line, but wouldn't it be fun to get your hands on this piece of hardware?
