The Roadrunner, which held the world’s-fastest computer title in 2008 and early 2009, was the first supercomputer to reach petaflop speeds (a million, billion floating-point operations per second).
Housed at Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, Roadrunner was designed to model nuclear weapon blasts for the US military – a development that has effectively made nuclear weapons tests obsolete.
The US$120 million (B3.5 billion) computer used 296 server racks, 122,400 processor cores, and featured parallel networks of an enhanced version of the Cell microprocessor used in the PlayStation 3.
Although the computer is still the 22nd fastest in the world, researchers say its power bill is so large that it is not worth keeping Roadrunner going.
Los Alamos has already installed a newer, cheaper, faster supercomputer, dubbed Cielo.
Roadrunner lost its title as the world’s-fastest in late 2009 to another supercomputer, Jaguar, which reached 1.76 petaflops at the time.
In 2012, Jaguar hit 17.6 petaflops, prompting researchers to look toward speeds 1,000 times faster than a petaflop.