A few months back, we caught wind of a weird new government project when the United States Air Force bought up 300 PlayStation 3 consoles. One of those sites that tracks the government's every move told us that they were working on something called codenamed "Roadrunner," though no other details were given. We tried to guess what they were doing with these, but it looks like some of us were a bit off base.
I don't know how exactly these projects are related, but Play tells us that IBM has just finished up the world's fastest supercomputer, and it uses the same Cell processors found in the PS3. The computer has been codenamed "Roadrunner," and it will be used to monitor nuclear weapons, space, weather, and more. Mystery solved!
Roadrunner will enable us to tackle problems we couldn't tackle before," said lab boss John Morrison. "We'll be able to run a different level of problems. We'll be able to do calculations that we wouldn't even consider before."
This beast can hit one-thousand trillion calculations per second, making it twice as fast as the next one, also built by IBM. I wonder if this new computer will get in-game XMB anytime soon.
I doubt it.
Dale North is Destructoid's Editor-In-Chief, a founding editor, and specialist in Japanese gaming. An accomplished musician, Dale was reporting from Japan during the earthquakes of 2011. Luckily, he got the fuck out alive and is home in America now with his wife and beloved corgi, Einstein. Dale is also a co-founder of Destructoid's sister anime site
Japanator. Likes Corgis, Sega Saturn, PSP, iPhone, Photographic tools.
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Contest:
10:24 AM on 06.10.2008
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Will any website ever report this story correctly?
Skynet is born and will become self aware.
I'm at at "true-blue" site working on mainframes and so I'm pretty used to huge numbers but at 1000 trillion calculations a second is just awesome! I wish I was the operator of that machine in stead of these crappy slow mainframes :p
What? Xenophobic Nintendo/Microsoft fanboys won't taste your lovely Snakiness and won't be murdered when their console builds a T-800 out of Blu-ray discs? More for me
Referencing 80's films... Yet more evidence to make me feel old.