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A US military supercomputer built by I.B.M. and Los Alamos National Laboratory has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second or 1.026 petaflops.

It is assembled from components originally designed for video game machines.

A petaflop is a measure of a computer’s processing speed and can be expressed as a thousand trillion floating point operations per second.

The new machine named “Roadrunner” in a reference to the state bird of New Mexico is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the I.B.M. BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

It is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an I.B.M. 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.

It also includes a smaller number of more conventional Opteron processors, made by Advanced Micro Devices, which are already widely used in corporate servers.

It costed US$133 million and will be used to study nuclear weapons. The Roadrunner will simulate the behavior of the weapons in the first fraction of a second during an explosion.

To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D’Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration said:

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.

Roadrunner, which consumes roughly three megawatts of power, or about the power required by a large suburban shopping center, requires three separate programming tools because it has three types of processors. Programmers have to figure out how to keep all of the 116,640 processor cores in the machine occupied simultaneously in order for it to run effectively.

According to Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for computer science at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory:

Roadrunner tells us about what will happen in the next decade. Technology is coming from the consumer electronics market and the innovation is happening first in terms of cellphones and embedded electronics.

Although American companies had dominated the field since its inception in the 1960s, in 2002 Japan’s Earth Simulator supercomputer shocked Washington and many believed that the United States could lose its lead in many areas, just as it did in climate science. It could execute more than 35 trillion mathematical calculations per second, the highest at that time.

The Earth Simulator Center reportedly negotiated deals with Japanese automakers to use time on the world’s fastest computer to boost their quality and productivity; that’s when the race became heated!

Having surpassed the petaflop barrier, I.B.M. is already looking toward the next generation of supercomputing i.e. by going for exaflop which is one quintillion (10^18) floating point operations per second.