PetaFLOP Computing Achieved With Cell Processor
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The PetaFLOP barrier has finally been broken by a supercomputer named RoadRunner. A PetaFLOP represents the ability to process a quadrillion floating point operations per second. IBM's Blue Gene was the previous processing speed king with less than half of RoadRunner's capabilities. For $133 million dollars, RoadRunner was constructed to process classified military simulations but will be available for use by climate scientists before being permanently moved to its classified status. To achieve its processing might, RoadRunner is composed of 12,960 modified Sony Cell processors (commonly known as the speedy brains beneath the PS3) and 6912 AMD Opteron chips.