IBM and Los Alamos Produce Roadrunner Supercomputer (Crysis Still Crashes…)

“It’s a very souped-up Playstation 3,” or at least that’s what David Turek, vice president of IBM’s supercomputing programs, said about his company’s newest baby, The Roadrunner. “We took the basic chip design [of a PS3] and advanced its capability,” said Turek, speaking about the computer’s use of a modified version of the PS3’s lauded “Cell” microprocessor.

Roadrunner is effectively twice as fast as IBM’s last record breaker, the Blue Gene.

Sadly, the Roadrunner won’t ever be used for the noble pursuit of gaming; instead, Roadrunner will be relegated to mundane tasks such as simulating nuclear explosions and mimicking the human brain. Yawn.

Importantly, the machine is a breakthrough for IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory, who developed the computer together. Just two weeks ago the computer was able to tackle a previously impossible task; to mimic in real-time the human visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes visual stimuli.

The new system is able to consistently reach processing speeds of up to a petaflop, considered the Holy Grail of supercomputing. To put that into perspective, a petaflop is 1,000 trillion operations a second, or roughly 100,000 Dell XPS gaming laptops stacked on top of each other. (You know the ones that have Dell’s super keen limited edition WoW skins!).

Oh, and if you’re curious, the Roadrunner was built from commercially available parts, so if your brain is bigger than Stewie Griffin’s and you have $100M in spare cash lying around than you could build one yourself. But really, that’s a small price to pay to play Crysis at its full potential.