World's fastest supercomputer models the unseen universe | DVICE

Description

It's hard to tell what the universe looks like, especially since it takes billions of years for the light from most of it to reach us. It's even more difficult to visualize the 70% of the matter in the universe that's invisible.

That's why scientists bring out the heavy iron, IBM Roadrunner, the world's fastest supercomputer, to simulate crazy stuff like dark energy and dark matter for us. It's crunching through data simulating galaxies full of trillions of stars at a sustained speed of faster than one petaflop, or 1 quadrillion calculations per second.

Original URL

http://dvice.com/archives/2009/10/worlds-fastest-2.php

http://dvice.com/archives/2009/10/worlds-fastest-2.php