IBM Roadrunner Beats All In Top 500 Supercomputer List

Boston (dbTechno) - The top 500 list for the most powerful supercomputers in the world was presented on Wednesday at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany, and it was the IBM Roadrunner leading the way.

The list looks at and measures the top commercial supercomputers in the world.

The 31st time the list came out was this year, with the IBM Roadrunner leading the pack.

The IBM Roadrunner is housed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory.

It was the first system to break the petaflop barrier, reaching 1.026 petaflops. 1 petaflop, in case you were wondering, equals out to a quadrillion calculations per second.

This beat out last year’s leader, BlueGene, also from IBM. This supercomputer reached 208.6 teraflops. The computer was second on the list this year hitting 478.2 teraflops.

The IBM Roadrunner is based on IBM QS22 blades and actually uses an advanced version of the Cell processor used in the Sony PlayStatioin 3, as well as chips from AMB.