IBM has shattered the world record for fastest computer with their new creation "Roadrunner!" This bad boy is made out of 13,000 PS3 Cell processors as well as an additional 7,000 AMD Dual Core Opterons and is capable of sustaining 1,000 Trillion calculations per second (1,000,000,000,000,000) or roughly twice as many as the now second fastest comp which is also an IBM creation.

This achievement goes to show how amazing the cell processor really is. It's uses go far beyond just gaming; the chip was actually a breakthrough in parallel processing allowing super computers beyond our previous reach to be created. There is no doubt in my mind in the near future this Roadrunner comp will be surpassed by another device simply made by stacking together even more processors. When we are all done with our PS3s 5 years from now perhaps they won't just sit on a shelf gathering dust but will actually have re-sale value to companies building machines such as this out of everyones old cores.

The purpose of Roadrunner is to monitor our national nuclear weapon stockpile. I find it really bizzare that a super computer would be needed for something like this. Is it a very calculation heavy monitoring process? "Yup, it's still sitting in the silo!" If this is now the fastest computer and it's dedicated to this task what was keeping track of our nukes before? A guy named bubba with one of those paddles that has the rubber ball on a string?