Gallery: Roadrunner: World's fastest supercomputer

It took miles of wire and a bunch of processors from PlayStation 3, but IBM was able to break the 1-petaflop barrier for supercomper speed.

By Andy Smith, Contributor June 18, 2008 at 1:13 a.m. PT

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IBM once again tops the Supercomputer 500 list but this time it's with Roadrunner, the first supercomputer to be able to process 1 petaflop or 1 quadrillion calculations per second. Roadrunner connects 6,562 dual-core AMD Opteron chips as well as 12,240 Cell chips and runs on open-source Linux software from Red Hat.

Roadrunner resides at the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory where its primary task will be to ensure the safety and reliability of the U.S's nuclear weapons stockpile.

For more on the world's fastest supercomputers, read Larry Dignan's blog.

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Some of the cable used to wire Roadrunner.

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Technicians crawling through the floors to hook up Roadrunner.

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Wiring the rack from the back.

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The First CU Compute Racks (front).

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Two IBM QS22 blade servers and one IBM LS21 blade server are combined into a specialized "Triblade" configuration for Roadrunner. A production Triblade.

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A schematic view of the Triblade which consists of two dual-core Opterons with 16 GB RAM and four PowerXCell 8i CPUs with 16 GB Cell RAM. Click on the image to enlarge.

Credit: Henriok

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Los Alamos and IBM researchers tested Roadrunner with "Petavision" which models the human visual system--mimicking more than 1 billion visual neurons and trillions of synapses.

Credit: LeRoy N. Sanchez, Records Management, Media Services and Operations