High performance computer is fastest in world
New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici on Thursday introduced a resolution in Congress recognizing the Laboratory and IBM for its supercomputing achievements with the new Roadrunner high performance computer.
The Roadrunner high-performance computer is now the fastest in the world. The computer, developed in partnership with IBM and housed at the Laboratory, reached a petaflop of sustained performance.
A "flop" is an acronym meaning floating-point operations per second. One petaflop is 1,000 trillion operations per second. To put this into perspective, if each of the 6 billion people on Earth had a hand calculator and worked together on a calculation 24 hours per day, 365 days a year, it would take 46 years to do what Roadrunner would do in one day.
The resolution notes the "visionary and extraordinary work" of the Laboratory and IBM for "pushing the barriers of science and providing the United States with historical high-performance computing capabilities that will allow some of the most challenging problems in science and engineering to be solved."
The resolution also states that Roadrunner "will allow the United States to solve even bigger and more complex problems from the safety of the nuclear deterrent of the United States to human genome science and climate change."
Read a news release from Domenici's office.
Read a DOE news release on Roadrunner.
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