Fastest supercomputer to be built

The BBC News reports that IBM is building a new supercomputer, nicknamedRoadrunner, for the U.S. Los Alamos National Laboratory. According to the BBC article and the IBM press release, the new system will obtain 1.6 petaflops, and it will utilize 16,000 AMD Opteron processors and 16,000 Cell Broadband Engine processors. This will be several times faster than the current fastest computer in the world, Blue Gene, which tops out around 360 teraflops.

This changes the map on computational power for code breaking or complex simulations, such as what Los Alamos plans on using it for. Expect to bump up key sizes in a year or two.