This is pretty sweet.
The US government is using video game technology to push forward science. We all know that video game tech is always on the bleeding edge, but others are taking notice and taking advantage.
A team at the Los Alamos National Lab in Los Alamos, New Mexico is building the world's fastest supercomputer - The Roadrunner. It will run at a blistering Petaflop - thats 1,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second!
And what will be powering it? The Cell Processor! Sweet!
Here is what one of the project heads said in an internal newsletter:
“We could not begin to leverage the kind of technological advances that we’re seeing without the lucrative videogame market,” said John Hopson, the Laboratory’s head of Advanced Simulation Computing.
“Game environments, more and more, mimic real life, in real time,” said Hopson. “This means their processors are doing many, many calculations also in real time. We thought, why not tap into that research and development, modify it to work a more technologically
advanced problem, and bring it here.”
They are first going to use it for maintaining the effectiveness and safety of the US nuclear weapons stockpile.
Awesome! The world's fasted supercomputer will always be tied to the PS3!
The US government is using video game technology to push forward science. We all know that video game tech is always on the bleeding edge, but others are taking notice and taking advantage.
A team at the Los Alamos National Lab in Los Alamos, New Mexico is building the world's fastest supercomputer - The Roadrunner. It will run at a blistering Petaflop - thats 1,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second!
And what will be powering it? The Cell Processor! Sweet!
Here is what one of the project heads said in an internal newsletter:
“We could not begin to leverage the kind of technological advances that we’re seeing without the lucrative videogame market,” said John Hopson, the Laboratory’s head of Advanced Simulation Computing.
“Game environments, more and more, mimic real life, in real time,” said Hopson. “This means their processors are doing many, many calculations also in real time. We thought, why not tap into that research and development, modify it to work a more technologically
advanced problem, and bring it here.”
They are first going to use it for maintaining the effectiveness and safety of the US nuclear weapons stockpile.
Awesome! The world's fasted supercomputer will always be tied to the PS3!