IBM's Roadrunner - Fastest super computer

IBM's Roadrunner breaks petaflop barrier. It's the first system to reach 1.026 petaflops (1 petaflop is equal to a quadrillion, or one thousand trillion, calculations per second).

The fastest supercomputer in the world is also one of the most energy efficient. That's according to the Top500 supercomputers list, to be released Wednesday at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany.

Twice yearly, the list measures the 500 most powerful computer systems available commercially. This year, the 31st time the list has been put together, the honor of top supercomputer goes to IBM's Roadrunner, which is housed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory. 

In total, Roadrunner takes up 278 refrigerator-size server racks, and connects 6,562 dual-core AMD Opteron and 12,240 Cell chips.

IBM, which continues its dominance of supercomputing, makes 210 of the 500 systems, including 5 of the top 10. Hewlett-Packard is close behind, however. HP makes 183 of the fastest computers, including the No. 8 fastest system known as EKA, located in Computational Research Laboratories' data center in Pune, India.

Rounding out the top 10 is Sun Microsystem's Ranger at No. 4, Cray's Jaguar at No. 5, SGI's Encanto at No. 7, and SGI's Altix at No. 10. 

Fun fact: the fastest supercomputer in the world--used to monitor the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile--is really just a PlayStation 3 on steroids. Roadrunner is based on the IBM QS22 blades, which are built using advanced versions of the Cell processor in Sony's PS3. It also runs using x86 chips from Advanced Micro Devices, making it the world's first hybrid supercomputer.