The United States Department of Energy (DoE) declared on Monday, June 9, that its new supercomputer ‘Roadrunner’ has effectively made 1,000 trillion calculations in a second, making it the fastest computer in the world. The DoE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will employ the Roadrunner to do calculations that will significantly enhance its capability to certify that the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile is reliable without conducting underground nuclear tests. The NNSA's Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is where the world’s fastest supercomputer will be stationed.

 

The Roadrunner has been created by Los Alamos National Laboratory in collaboration with IBM. It took them six long years to develop this supercomputer, which was being created to meet the nation’s growing national security requirements. This 100-million-dollar machine has set new limits for supercomputing by crossing the one petaflop threshold. One petaflop is equivalent to a thousand trillion operations per second. Roadrunner supercomputer will also serve to provide crucial access to trace the aging nuclear weapon stockpile in the US.