National Center for Computational Sciences

Welcome to the petaflop generation. That was the message today as the new most powerful supercomputer in the world IBM’s $100 million Roadrunner system installed at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory was officially named the most powerful and energy efficient supercomputer in the world.

TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers was unveiled at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden and proclaimed that Roadrunner achieved performance of 1.026 petaflop/s-becoming the first supercomputer ever to reach that performance milestone. At the same time, Roadrunner is also one of the most energy efficient systems on the TOP500.

Rounding out the top five positions, all of which are in the US are the new IBM BlueGene/P (450.3 teraflop/s) at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory, the new Sun SunBlade x6420 “Ranger” system (326 teraflop/s) at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas - Austin, and the upgraded Cray XT4 “Jaguar” (205 teraflop/s) at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

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