Think your computer is fast? Well the folks at Los Alamos & IBM are boasting that they have the world’s fastest computer which can calculate some 1,ooo trillion calcs per second. Which in itself is interesting that someone can actually calculate the number 1,000 trillion, let alone in a second. The articles states that:

The technology breakthrough was accomplished by engineers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the IBM Corp. on a computer to be used primarily on nuclear weapons work, including simulating nuclear explosions.

The computer, named Roadrunner, is twice as fast as IBM’s Blue Gene system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which itself is three times faster than any of the world’s other supercomputers, according to IBM.

But officials said the computer also could have a wide range of other applications in civilian engineering, medicine and science, from developing biofuels and designing more fuel-efficient cars to finding drug therapies and providing services to the financial industry.

To put the computer’s speed in perspective, if every one of the 6 billion people on Earth used a hand-held computer and worked 24 hours a day, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner computer can do in a single day.

There was one disturbing line in the report:

The computer is a speed demon. It will allow us to solve tremendous problems,” said Thomas D’Agostino, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees nuclear weapons research and maintains the warhead stockpile.

One would pray that this computing power would not be used to create any more weapons, but that the system would be used to better all of mankind.

Comments welcome.

Source.