The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) announced Monday that its new supercomputer "Roadrunner" had successfully performed 1,000 trillion calculations per second -- the fastest in the world.
Roadrunner will be used by the DoE's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to perform calculations that vastly improve the ability to certify that the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile is reliable without conducting underground nuclear tests, according to a statement released by DoE.
Roadrunner will be housed at NNSA's Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The laboratory worked with manufacturer IBM for six years to develop the super machine, which can meet "the nation's evolving national security needs."
The 100-million-dollar machine has redefined the frontier of supercomputing by crossing the one petaflop threshold.
A "flop" is an acronym meaning floating-point operations per second. One petaflop is 1,000 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.
Roadrunner is twice as fast as IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which itself is three times faster than any of the world's other supercomputers, according to IBM.
This new superfast computer will also offer important access to track the aging nuclear weapon stockpile in the United States.
Most nuclear weapons in the U.S. stockpile were produced anywhere from 30 to 40 years ago, and no new nuclear weapons have been produced since the end of the Cold War, according to the DoE.
Since President George Bush ended underground nuclear testing in 1992, the United States has relied on science-based research and development to extend the lifetime of the current weapons in the stockpile.
Therefore, NNSA's ability to model the extraordinary complexity of nuclear weapons systems is essential to maintaining confidence in the performance of the aging stockpile, said the DoE.
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