IBM’s RoadRunner

) IBM’s Roadrunner supercomputer has smashed the high-tech equivalent of the four-minute mile by breaking the lofty petaflop barrier.

IBM executives announced today that the company’s latest supercomputer - a hybrid system running AMD Opteron processors and Cell chips - sustained a speed of 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second. That’s about twice as fast as the next fastest supercomputer, IBM’s BlueGene/L, which is based at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.