petaflops

On June 10, IBM announced that LANL Roadrunner supercomputer reached a record-breaking one petaflop -- a quadrillion floating point operations per second -- using the standard Linpack benchmark. It is the first general-purpose computer to reach this milestone. The new performance record represents more than twice the computational power of the reigning TOP500 champ, Lawrence Livermore's Blue Gene/L supercomputer.

With the June 9 announcement that “RoadRunner” is the first system to reach the 1 petaflop/s level, the HPC community is entering a realm of unprecedented computing power.

The 31st list will be released during the Opening Session of the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC’08) in Dresden, Germany. We are curious to see whether the first Petaflop/s system will have made it into the next TOP500. One of the hot candidates certainly is Roadrunner at LANL in Los Alamos, USA.