Only the name has changed. IBM retained the title of world's fastest computer makers. Instead of the perennial winner Blue Gene/L, this time it is Roadrunner, housed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory. This supercomputer from IBM attains the speed of petaflops, first ever attained by any computer. The ranking was announced this Wednesday during the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany, a biannual event that ranks the 500 most powerful computers around the world. According to the TOP500 ranking, it achieved a peak performance of 1.026 petaFLOPS (floating point operations per second) to take the top spot. One petaflop is equal to a quadrillion, or one thousand trillion, calculations per second. The No. 2 BlueGene/L, also made by IBM Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, attained the speed of 478.2 teraflops. IBM's Roadrunner is powered by 12,240 IBM PowerXCell 8i Cell chips similar to those found in the gaming console The basic computing functions are handled by 6,562 AMD Opteron dual-core processors, leaving the Cell chips available to deal with the heavy lifting necessary for the math-intensive calculations in which the processors specialize. It takes the space of 278 refrigerator-size server racks. IBM, continuing its dominance in supercomputing, makes 210 of the 500 supercomputers. 5 out of the top 10 supercomputers comes from IBM. Just behind them is HP (Hewlett-Packard ), making 183 of the fastest computers. The Top 10 Fastest Supercomputers Take a look
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