Bip-Bip...computer passing by Claudia Sonea

What do you think that you could find at the IBM research laboratory in Poughkeepsie? The world's fastest supercomputer called Roadrunner after the famous cartoon character. The engineers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and IBM Corp. worked really hard in the last six years and on Monday they unveiled the $100 million machine that will revolutionize the technology industry and will be of great help in a wide range of applications. Although this computer was created for nuclear weapons work like simulating nuclear explosions, it could help in civilian engineering, medicine and science (develop a vaccine for the HIV virus, examine the chemistry in the production of cellulose ethanol, drug therapy, and so on and so forth). It is more powerful than 100,000 of today's most powerful laptops and on May 25 it was submitted to a test succeeding to perform 1,000 trillion operations per second, thus being much more faster than IBM's Blue Gene system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory which was until now the fastest. David Turek, vice president of IBM's supercomputing programs, stated that it has at the base principles of the popular video games and could even be considered a giant Sony PlayStation 3. He added that it will come on handy now when the energy is getting more and more expensive. Its use will not be in the next six months in government’s activities, but rather in unspecific work, according to Michael Anastasio, director of the Los Alamos lab. Te computer is a breakthrough and hopefully it will be used to help humanity and not to lead to its doom.

related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080609/ap_on_hi_te/fastest_computer;_ylt=Ankyi3PHo0lOeMtylOF3Hb6s0NUE

by Claudia Sonea for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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