PlayStation 3 Processors Power World’s Fastest Petaflop Supercomputer

IBM engineer Don Grice inspects ‘Roadrunner’, the world’s fastest computer, at the company’s plant

NEW YORK: A US military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for Sony’s PlayStation 3, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1,000 trillion calculations per second (petaflop).

The new machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the IBM BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, the New York Times reported on Monday.

The $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner, was devised and built by engineers and scientists at IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P D’Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day for seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.

It will be used principally to solve classified US military problems, ensuring that the country’s stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age.

Before it is placed in a classified environment, it will also be used to explore scientific problems like climate change.

The Roadrunner is based on a design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an IBM Cell microprocessor, a parallel-processing chip originally created for Sony’s PlayStation 3 video-game machine.

Roadrunner, which consumes roughly three megawatts of power, or about the power required by a large shopping centre, requires three separate programming tools because it has three types of processors. Programmers have to figure out how to keep all of the 1,16,640 processor cores in the machine occupied simultaneously in order for it to run effectively. IANS