Roadrunner supercomputer sets records

Los Alamos, N.M. -- Scientists say one of the world's newest supercomputers is already setting records at a U.S. national laboratory less than a month after being activated.

The Los Alamos National Laboratory's Roadrunner supercomputer operates at the petascale. The prefix "peta" stands for a million billion, also known as a quadrillion. For the Roadrunner supercomputer, operating at petaflop performance means the machine can process a million billion calculations every second.

Earlier this month, Roadrunner surpassed that scale of one quadrillion computations a second, or a petaflop. Two days later it reached a new computing performance record of 1.144 petaflops.

The achievement, said the researchers, opens the door to eventually enabling human-like cognitive performance in electronic computers.

"Roadrunner ushers in a new era for science at Los Alamos National Laboratory," said Terry Wallace, associate director for science, technology and engineering at Los Alamos. "Just a week after formal introduction of the machine to the world, (it was) already doing computational tasks that existed only in the realm of imagination a year ago."

Scientists said Roadrunner, built by the IBM Corp., is the world's first supercomputer to achieve sustained operating performance speeds of one petaflop.

Copyright 2008 by United Press International.