$100 million supercomputer unleashed: world's first "hybrid" technology uses green engineering, video game chips.

It's not a Mac. It's not PC. It's the world's fastest computer and it goes by the name of "Roadrunner."

Named after the state bird of New Mexico, where the computer is based at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Roadrunner cost about $100 million and was a three-phase project to deliver the world's first "hybrid" supercomputer--one powerful enough to operate at one petaflop (1,000 trillion calculations per second). That's roughly equivalent to the combined computing power of 100,000 of today's fastest laptop computers.

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Roadrunner will primarily be used to ensure the safety and reliability of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile. It also will be used for research into astronomy, energy, human genome science and climate change. In a first-of-a-kind design, the Cell Broadband Engine--originally designed for video game platforms such as the Sony PlayStation 3-will work in conjunction with x86 processors from AMD.

According to IBM, the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration tapped the company to design and build the Roadrunner and selected Los Alamos as the development site in 2006. The Roadrunner system has 98 terabytes of memory and is housed in 278 refrigeratorsized IBM BladCenter racks occupying 5,200 square feet. Its 10,000 connections--both Infiniband and Gigabit Ethernet-require 55 miles of fiber-optic cable. Roadrunner weighs 500,000 lbs.

The machine was built, tested and benchmarked in IBM's Poughkeepsie, N.Y., plant, home of the ASCI series of supercomputers the company built for the U.S. government in the late 1990s. IBM's site in Rochester, Minn., constructed the specialized tri-blade servers. Software development was led by IBM engineers in Austin, Texas, and by researchers in IBM's Yorktown Heights, N.Y., research lab. Roadrunner will be loaded onto 21 tractor trailer trucks later this summer when it is delivered to the Los Alamos lab.

Compared to most traditional supercomputer designs, Roadrunner's hybrid format sips power (2.35 megawatts) and delivers world-leading efficiency--437 million calculations per watt.

IBM also is developing new software to make cell-powered hybrid computing broadly accessible. Roadrunner's massive software effort targets commercial applications for hybrid supercomputing. With corporate and academic partners, IBM is developing an open-source ecosystem that will bring hybrid supercomputing to financial services, energy exploration and medical imaging industries among others.

Applications for cell-based hybrid supercomputing include calculating cause and effect in capital markets in real-time and supercomputers in financial services can instantly predict the ripple effect of a stock market change throughout the markets. In medicine, complex 3-D renderings of tissues and bone structures will happen in real-time as patients are being examined.

In the past 10 years, supercomputer power has increased nearly 1,000 times. Today, just three of Roadrunner's 3,456 tri-blade units have the same power as the 1998 fastest computer. A complex physics calculation that will take Roadrunner one week to complete would have taken the 1998 machine 20 years to finish. If it were possible for cars to improve their gas mileage over the past decade at the same rate that supercomputers have improved their cost and efficiency, we'd be getting 200,000 miles to the gallon today.