A United States military computer, named Road Runner, has reached the petaflop mark, that is one thousand trillion calculations per second.
According to the newspaper The New York Times, the new $133 million (€88,6 million) supercomputer, was designed and built by engineers and scientists at IBM and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Last March, the computer firm NEC and the Institute of
Tokyo Technology announced the development of the technology for a supercomputer capable of ten petaflops, which would be ready by 2010.
FLOP is the acronym for floating point operations per second, and one petaflop is equivalent to 10 flops raised to the fifteenth power.
According to press reports the computer, called in English Roadrunner - in homage to the official bird of the State of New Mexico - will be used mainly to solve secret military problems.
"Before it is placed in a secret environment, the Road Runner will also be used to explore scientific problems such as climate change," he says. The New York Times.
Thomas D'Agostino, head of the National Directorate of Nuclear Security, assures that if the more than 6.000 million people around the planet used calculators and made calculations 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do the same. that Road Runner can do in a day.
Road Runner, which consumes about three megawatts of energy, requires three separate programming tools because it has three types of processors. For it to work most efficiently, programmers must manage to keep all 116.640 processor cores in the machine busy.