A supercomputer with components originally developed for Sony's PlayStation video-game console has become the world's fastest computer.

IBM said the computer, nicknamed Roadrunner, can process more than 1,000 trillion calculations per second, known as a petaflop. Built for the Energy Department's Los Alamos lab with off-the-shelf components, Roadrunner is named for the state bird of New Mexico and will be used to monitor the U.S. nuclear-weapons stockpile.

Roadrunner cost $133 million and is twice as fast as IBM's Blue Gene system, which had been considered the world's most powerful. The Blue Gene is at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

Along with almost 7,000 dual-core processors from Advanced Micro Devices, the Roadrunner also has almost 13,000 improved Cell microprocessors originally developed by IBM, Toshiba and Sony Computer Entertainment for the PlayStation 3. The Cell combines the Power Architecture instruction set with coprocessors to accelerate computing.

Roadrunner will make it possible for the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration to certify the reliability of the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons without the need for underground nuclear tests. To accomplish this, it will be used to solve classified military problems.

"Roadrunner tells us about what will happen in the next decade," said Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for computer science at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "Technology is coming from the consumer electronics market, and the innovation is happening first in terms of cell phones and embedded electronics."

Since President George H.W. Bush ended underground nuclear tests in 1992, the United States has relied on research and development to extend the life of the stockpile of nuclear weapons, most of which were created 30 to 40 years ago.

To illustrate the power of Roadrunner, the Energy Department said it can perform a calculation in one day that would take 46 years if everyone on Earth used a hand calculator for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

U.S. Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman said, "Roadrunner will not only play a key role in maintaining the U.S. nuclear deterrent, it will also contribute to solving our global energy challenges and open new windows of knowledge in the basic scientific research fields."

Before Roadrunner begins verifying nuclear weapons, it will be used to explore scientific problems like climate change.

Some observers see the Roadrunner as a resurgence in supercomputing for the United States, which dominated the field from the 1960s to 2002 when Japan's Earth Simulator briefly became the world's fastest by executing more than 35 trillion mathematical calculations per second.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20080609/bs_nf/60205