IBM building world's fastest supercomputer using Opteron and Cell processors

The Cell processor, known as the heart of the PS3, is being used every day in rather extraordinary situations. IBM has crafted yet another supercomputer, codenamed Roadrunner, which runs at a record-setting petaflop speed. (A petaflop is the equivalent of one thousand trillion calculations per second.) This speed makes Roadrunner twice as fast as the previous best supercomputer.

One reason there's so much fuss (and delay) over the upcoming PlayStation 3 platform is the fact that it sports those new Cell processors jointly developed with Sony and Toshiba. Now those Cell process are about to find themselves pumping away at the heart of a new $35 million supercomputer for Los Alamo's National Laboratory. But this won't be just supercomputer mind you, IBM is hoping to reclaim the title of the world's fastest once completed in 2007. Dubbed Roadrunner, IBM plans to jump from 280-teraflops to a full petaflop performance by combining AMD Opteron blade servers and Cell-based accelerator systems. A performance threshold achieved earlier this year by NEC's MDGrape-3, the supercomputer behind new pharmaceutical drugs and the curious taste and powerful punch of Mad Dog's 20/20 Red Grape Malt beverage.

"We are getting closer to simulating the real world," Bijan Davari, vice president of next generation computing systems at IBM, told BBC News. The computer will be installed in a US government laboratory to monitor the US nuclear stockpile. It will also be used for research into astronomy, genomic and climate change.

The Roadrunner will use less than 20,000 chips, and will use a hybrid design of both conventional supercomputer chips, and PS3's Cell processor.

An IBM demo shows the contrast. A terrain rendering program lets you fly over Mount Rainier at 1,300mph. Cell crunches through millions of lines of topographical and photographic data per second to paint topographically accurate, photo-quality pictures at a movie-quality 30 frames per second. On a similar program a Pentium takes more than two minutes to sketch a single frame.