The “Roadrunner” supercomputer, built by IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists, has reached a computing milestone by processing one thousand trillion calculations per second (a petaflop).

It is more than twice as fast as the IBM BlueGene/L, the previous record holder, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and will be used for nuclear-weapon calculations and scientific problems like global climate change.

The Roadrunner uses a radical design that includes 12,960 IBM Cell microprocessor chips–an improved version of the parallel processing chip originally created for Sony’s PlayStation 3. It also includes a smaller number of more conventional AMD Opteron processors.

Note: The latest rankings and performance for BlueGene/L and the rest of the world’s fastest general- purpose supercomputers will be announced on June 18 at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden. – Ed.