The United States' nuclear stockpile in Los Alamos will soon be monitored by a powerful computer made out of parts you might have in your living room - the PlayStation 3's Cell processor. Nicknamed the Roadrunner, the IBM-built supercomputer is comprised completely of off-the-shelf components, including nearly 7,000 dual-core AMD Opteron processors and almost 13,000 Cell processors. The machine can process more than one thousand trillion calculations per second, making it twice as fast as the world's current fastest computer, IBM's Blue Gene.

If only we had had access to this sort of technology back in 1983. The movie WarGames would have been so much better. "Would you like to play a game? How about Resistance: Fall of Man?"

IBM unveils fast new computer for US Energy Dept. [Newsday.com]

Send an email to Michael Fahey, the author of this post, at .