Big Blue scores bid to build world's fastest PC

IBM has won a bid to build a supercomputer called Roadrunner that will include not just conventional Opteron chips but also the Cell processor used in the Sony Playstation, silicon.com sister site CNET News.com has learned.

The supercomputer, for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, will be the world's fastest machine and is designed to sustain a performance level of a "petaflop" or one quadrillion calculations per second, said US senator Pete Domenici earlier this year.

Bidding for the system opened in May, when a congressional subcommittee allocated $35m for the first phase of the project, said Domenici, a Republican from New Mexico, where the nuclear weapons lab is located.

Now sources familiar with the machine have said IBM has won the contract and the National Nuclear Security Administration is expected to announce the deal in the coming days. The system is expected to be built in phases, beginning in September and finishing by 2007 if the US government chooses build the full petaflop system.

There's plenty of competition in the high-end supercomputing race, though. Japan's Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, called Riken, announced in June it had completed its Protein Explorer supercomputer. The Protein Explorer reached the petaflop level, Riken said, though not using the conventional Linpack supercomputing speed test.

Representatives of IBM and Los Alamos declined to comment for this story. The National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees US nuclear weapons work at Los Alamos and other sites, didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Stephen Shankland writes for CNET News.com