What's in the name?

IBM heeft een nieuwe supercomputer gebouwd met de welluidende naam roadrunner:

The Roadrunner hybrid architecture.

Zie: http://www.sandia.gov/NNSA/ASC/enews/1106/1106roadrunner.html
En inderdaad, deze machine is hybride (een mix van).

IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer is a mix of new and commodity technologies.

POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y.—In the Warner Bros. cartoons, the Road Runner dashed across a vast desert landscape continually outmaneuvering its archrival, Wile E. Coyote, thanks to incredible speed and quick thinking.

IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer will also find a home in a desert landscape—Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico—and will also rely on speed and quick thinking, or in this case calculations, to keep ahead of its competition. The massive system is poised to become one of the world's fastest high-performance computers, according to IBM officials.

At IBM's facility here in upstate New York, engineers are putting the final touches on Roadrunner before it's shipped to the Department of Energy's facility in Los Alamos in August. Donald Grice, IBM's chief engineer for the Roadrunner project, said the $100 million machine is likely to offer a sustained performance of 1 petaflop—1 quadrillion calculations per second—a goal that several other HPC makers such as Cray, Sun Microsystems and SGI are working toward.

In the past two weeks, SGI and Intel have announced plans to create a supercomputer at NASA that will break the petaflop mark. Meanwhile, Sun is working toward its own system that will reach the petaflop plateau.