IBM Roadrunner

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Roadrunner is the name given to a next-generation supercomputer to be built at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The computer may achieve a sustained performance level of 1 petaflops, or 1,000 trillion calculations per second. IBM will build the computer for the US Department of Energy. It will be a hybrid design with more than 16,000 AMD Opteron cores (~2200 IBM x3755 4U servers, each holding four dual core Opterons, connected by Infiniband) and a comparable amount of Cell microprocessors, which are also used in the PlayStation 3 game console. It is likely that a newer generation of the Cell will be used, which is expected to be able to do two double precision calculations in its 128 bit registers instead of only four single precision calculations like the current version. Scientific computing usually requires double precision. The Roadrunner will be based on the Red Hat Linux operating system and will utilize the new AMD Torrenza technology. When completed, it will be the world's most powerful computer, and cover approximately 12,000 square feet (1,100 square meters). It is expected to be operational in 2008.

The computer may be used for simulating how nuclear materials age and whether the aging nuclear weapon arsenal of the United States is safe and reliable.