Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) plans to build a supercomputer based on both Opteron and Cell CPUs. Several companies competed for the contract, but it looks like IBM will be allowed to build the speed monster. The project will go through life under the name Roadrunner and should offer a petaflop per second of computing power. The LANL was long regarded as one of the top organizations in the field of supercomputers, but saw many of its researchers leave and its market position collapsed. With Roadrunner, it aims to repair the damage suffered. The current number one on the supercomputer top500 list is a BlueGene, also from IBM, and delivers up to 367000GFlops or over 280 teraflops. Currently $35 million has been earmarked for the construction of the system, but it is estimated that the final bill will be close to $100 million.
Roadrunner will be involved in, among other things, the simulation of nuclear explosions. Experts point out that it might be a good idea to reserve a nuclear power plant to supply energy to the supercomputer. John Gustafson of Clearspeed, a supplier of supercomputing components, argues that reaching petaflop capabilities with traditional processors can easily require tens of megawatts of power. He counted ZDNet for a while in front of that this system will soon cost ten million dollars in annual operating costs.