Meep meep. The PlayStation 3's powerful hardware does it again, contributing its powerful Cell Broadband Engine to create the world's fastest supercomputer, er... again. Named the Roadrunner, this new supercomputer runs at speeds exceeding one petaflop - that is, one thousand trillion calculations per second. Let's see Wile E. Coyote try to catch up with that. Watch a mini-documentary of the supercomputer in the full article.

IBM wins the bid to build "Roadrunner", a supercomputer system that will compete (and hopes to outdo) Japan's "Protein Explorer" and its own Blue Gene/L. IBM-Los Alamos will announce the plans as to when the project will officially start, but it's going to be a phase by phase process that begins this September and ends in 2007.

It seems a little off-topic, PS3 fans should start rejoicing. The Roadrunner kicks off a new trend in supercomputing, which relies on "hybrids" to sustain the performance level of a "petaflop," or 1 quadrillion calculations per second. These hybrids are a combination of general-purpose processors and special-purpose accelerator chips. In this case, it's going to be not just Opteron chips, but the Cell processor from Sony's PS3 as well. The Cell processor as we know it was originally designed to improve video game performance in the PlayStation 3 console.

Obviously, this is going to lead us to a futuristic conclusion: With more powerful petaflop-churning supercomputers, there will be greater possibility for more high-speed gaming systems and machines to come out in the future. Also, because the U.S. government has become an avid supercomputer customer, the nuclear simulations will be continuously fueled.

Gaming, as we know it, will never be the same again.