But can it play video games?

[MG1968]

Supercomputer sets record - International Herald Tribune

An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.

To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas D'Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.

The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an IBM Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony's PlayStation 3 video-game machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations.

1 Petaflop... 1000 trillion calculations/second.

pretty damn quick, but I'm willing to bet they saddled it with crappy onboard video... :thumbsup:

 

[Chad003]

I wonder if that thing gets the RROD?

 

[rwemyss]

The article also mentions that the supercomputer includes Opterons, and I third processor type, but didn't say what the third processor was.

 

[mattvols]

Why exactly do they need a computer like this?

 

[rwemyss]

Research. The article indicates that before going classified the machine will run some environmental models. Once it goes classified it will run simulations on how effective the country's aging nuclear arsenal will be in the coming decades.

 

[utvolpj]

Research. The article indicates that before going classified the machine will run some environmental models. Once it goes classified it will run simulations on how effective the country's aging nuclear arsenal will be in the coming decades.

here's a classified pic

 

[rpvol]

Skynet?

 

[rwemyss]

RE: PJ