IBM Roadrunner is the world’s most powerful supercomputer.
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.