IBM’s “Roadrunner” supercomputer on Wednesday earned the title of the world’s most powerful supercomputer. The IBM Roadrunner, located at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, achieved a peak performance of 1.026 petaFLOPS, overpassing IBM’s BlueGene L and P systems to take the top spot. Six months ago, Blue Gene/L reigned supreme among the world’s fastest computers with a record 478.2 teraFLOPS. Trillions of calculations each second was only good enough for second place this time around. Roadrunner outperformed other supercomputers using a hybrid processor design that combines its Cell Broadband Engine with AMD’s Opteron dual-core processors.
The ranking was bestowed during the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany, in a biannual event that ranks the 500 most powerful computers around the world. The top supercomputer in the UK was an IBM PowerPC cluster located at the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, ranked 18th overall.
