Supercomputer Breaks Petaflop Barrier

摘要

The US Department of Energy's (DoE's) Roadrunner supercomputer has become the first to achieve a petaflop of sus- tained performance. The Los Alamos-based computer will be used by the DoE's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to perform calculations to enable the reliability of the US nuclear weapons stockpile to be certified without conducting underground nuclear tests. One petaflop is 1000 trillion operations per second. To put this into perspective, if each of the 6 billion people on Earth had a hand calculator and worked together on a calculation 24 hours per day, 365 days a year, it would take 46 years to do what Roadrunner would do in one day.