World's fastest computer PS3-powered

Codenamed Roadrunner, it runs as petaflop speeds--one thousand trillion calculations per second, reports the BBC. The previous most powerful computer in the world, BlueGene/L, currently runs at 478.2 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second) and uses 212,992 processors.

However, Roadrunner will need only 20,000 chips to achieve previously unheard of petaflop speed, as the design will use both conventional Opteron processors made by AMD and the PlayStation 3's Cell processor.

Almost 13,000 of the PS3's Cell processors are used in Roadrunner, and each of the 8-core chips runs at speeds of 4GHz. It was designed over several years by engineers from Sony, IBM, and Toshiba. The Cell chips are used as accelerators for portions of calculations, reports the New York Times.

Roadrunner will be used at America's Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to monitor the country's nuclear stockpile. The massive machine will be housed in 288 fridge-sized cases, and will be linked together with 57 miles of fibre-optic cable. It consumes around three megawatts of power, roughly the same amount needed to run a large shopping centre.

Speaking to The New York Times, Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for computer science at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, commented, "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 cell phones and embedded electronics."

According to Thomas P. D'Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, if all 6 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 Roadrunner can in one day.