June 10, 2008	Tuesday	Jamadi-us-Sani 05, 1429

WASHINGTON, June 9: A computer designed to run virtual tests of US nuclear weapons will be the world’s fastest making 1,000 trillion calculations per second, the US Department of Energy said on Monday.

The IBM Roadrunner supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is the first to achieve what is known as a petaflop of sustained performance, the department said.

“Flop” is an acronym meaning floating-point operations per second. One petaflop is 1,000 trillion computer calculations per second. “Roadrunner will not only play a key role in maintaining the US nuclear deterrent, it will also contribute to solving our global energy challenges, and open new windows of knowledge in the basic scientific research fields,” it added. “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,” it said.—Reuters