IBM`s Roadrunner Speeds Toward a Petaflop (
Page 1 of 9 ) The New Mexico state bird is the roadrunner, which helps explain the name that IBM bestowed upon the supercomputer it plans to install at New Mexico-based Los Alamos National Laboratory in August. The name is also an allusion to the roadrunner's speed: IBM engineers say they believe that the high-performance supercomputer will become the first to break the petaflop mark—1 quadrillion calculations per second—when the Top 500 Supercomputer Sites list is updated in June. eWEEK took a look at Roadrunner in IBM's Poughkeepsie, N.Y., facility.
A Piece of the Puzzle
When it's complete, Roadrunner will take up 6,000 square feet and weigh more than 500,000 pounds. Here's one of the 18 different "connected units" that will make up Roadrunner.
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Infrastructure 
