Gallery: Roadrunner: World's fastest supercomputer

IBM once again tops the Supercomputer 500 list but this time it's with Roadrunner, the first supercomputer to be able to process 1 petaflop or 1 quadrillion calculations per second. Roadrunner connects 6,562 dual-core AMD Opteron chips as well as 12,240 Cell chips and runs on open-source Linux software from Red Hat.

Roadrunner resides at the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory where its primary task will be to ensure the safety and reliability of the U.S's nuclear weapons stockpile.

For more on the world's fastest supercomputers, read Larry Dignan's blog.