IBM has designed a new $100m supercomputer named “Roadrunner”, that is powerful enough to operate at 1 petaflop – that’s 1 thousand trillion calculations a second (beat that Vorderman).  The system is twice as fast as the next closest super computer – the IBM Blue Gene system - and nearly three times as fast as other top supercomputers in the world.

To put the whole system in perspective – Roadrunner’s computing power is the equivalent of 100,000 of today’s fastest laptops. IBM says that if you took the whole population of the earth and gave them a calculator – that’s about 6 billion people – and they used them at a rate of one calculation a second, it would take humans more than 46 years to do what Roadrunner can do in a day.

“What I find particularly interesting about it . . . is that it’s the first instance of a hybrid supercomputer,” said Charles King, principal analyst for Pund-IT.

“Rather than just a monolithic single chip architecture, this is a blended architecture that uses AMD Opteron and IBM processors,” he said.

“The angle that AMD was taking on this is that by creating an integrated blend of chip architectures, Roadrunner would be able to not only achieve high performance, but could also be used for a wider variety of supercomputing activities,” he added.

Roadrunner uses IBM’s Cell Broadband Engine, which remarkably was originally developed for Sony’s Playstation 3 video game console, and works with AMD’s x86 Opteron processors, creating the hybrid architecture.

The system is made from commercially available parts – 6,948 dual core AMD Opteron chips on IBM LS21 blade servers with 12,960 Cell engines on IBM QS22 blade servers.

Roadrunner has 80 terabytes of memory and is crammed into 288 fridge-sized IBM BladeCentre racks that weigh 500,000 pounds and occupy 6,000 square feet. It’s not exactly portable…

Boasting a 10,000 Infiniband and Gigabit Ethernet connection requiring 57 miles of fibre optic cable, and it runs on Red Hat’s Linux software.

“Over the last five years, there’s been this massive shift in supercomputer design. The older architectures were designed from bottom up. They were highly proprietary, and everybody had their own secret sauce to pour onto the mix,” King pointed out.

“In the last few years, things have shifted radically to clustered x86 systems instead,” he added, noting that about 90 percent of the world’s top supercomputers are made up of clustered x86 processors.

This summer, IBM will load Roadrunner onto 21 tractor trailer trucks and deliver it to the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico, where it will be used to ensure the safety and reliability of the United States’ nuclear weapons stockpile.

It will also be used for research into astronomy, energy, human genome science and climate change.