For the second time running (no pun intended), the Department of Energy's Cell-powered Roadrunner system has once again claimed the top spot in the Top 500 Supercomputers list.

Oh, you'd think the Large Hadron Collider would have made an impact (again, no pun intended) on the list, but nooo, the PS3 chip's advanced - and slightly hybrid-ized - brother is leaving the rest of the competition in the dust.

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.

One of the world's fastest supercomputers, the Blue Gene/P, is powered by the PS3 CELL chip and has reached a speed of 280.6 teraflops. However, this is just a modicum of what the Institute for Advanced Architectures is planning: a computer that can use exaflops. An exaflop is a thousand times faster than a teraflop. That's faster than you can say "Leeroy Jenkins!" Oops, too slow. More in the full article.

(Editor's Note: After the TGS, you'd think that things would go back to their "normal" pace in the gaming industry, but see, the gaming industry isn't all that "normal" to begin with. Harhar. As the Chesire Cat once told Alice: "We're all mad here." Now, if you might remember, our 13th Issue of QuickJump QuickPeek rolled out early, which means this edition might cover some news from last week which weren't included in the previous issue. Yes, it's not "normal" procedure as QuickPeek posts go. And we're saying that with a disembodied Chesire grin.)

A few days ago, we ended the previous TGS Special Edition of QuickJump QuickPeek with a series of open questions. Well, if Master Yoda had anything to say about it, it'd go somewhere along the lines of "Rumors lead to questions. Questions lead to TGS. TGS leads to answers. And answers... lead to more questions... and the eventual Hamill-tendency to scream out 'Nooooo!'"

This week though, it's anything but a miserable negative outburst. We're getting some answers all right. With us having the tendency of screaming out '"Yeeeees!" instead. How so? Let's see, shall we? M33's identity (i.e. Dark AleX, Mathiuelh, et. al.) revealed, Halo 3 week, Folding@Home's ongoing success, building anticipation for the Wii Zapper... Let's not get ahead of ourselves here though! Get busy with your mouse and start scrolling down!


Hit the Full Article link below to see the rest of this week's issue!

Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) Senior Development Manager for Research and Development Noam Rimon posted an article over at the official PlayStation Blog regarding another milestone for the PlayStation 3 console in connection with Standford University's Folding@Home project.

It was only last week when we reported that the entire project has finally broken the so-called Petaflop barrier. It means that Folding@Home was finally able to accomplished more than a quadrillion floating point operations per second. Then comes today's record-breaking news, revealed by Rimon:

The influx of gamers supporting this cause has grown so greatly that we've actually broken a second record within a week! This time the aggregated computation power of the PS3 consoles - by themselves - has crossed the Petaflop line.

The output of all the participating PlayStation 3 consoles in the project now totals 1,020 TFLOPS from 41,145 participants. This is certainly a good day for PS3 owners and we'd like to conclude this one with Noam Rimon's own words, "How does it feel to be part of the most powerful distributed computer network in the world"?

Join: QJ.net Folding@Home Team: #52781

Over two years ago, Apple Computer stunned the world with the introduction of its XServe G5 with 30 GigaFLOP Processor.

Researchers at Japan's Institute of Physical and Chemical Research are developing a machine that will leave it in the dust.

The MDGRAPE-3, aka. the "Protein Explorer," will be able to perform calculations at the rate of one "petafFLOP," or over one quadrillion FLOating Point operations per second.  This number is equivalent to 2⁵⁰, or 1,125,899,906,842,624.  This computer will be used to perform simulations of molecular dynamics and non-bonding interactions between atoms. The entire system consist of 24 of the Institute's LSI chips, connected to a total of 101 parallel servers - 64 of which are equipped with 256 Intel 5000 cores, and the remaining servers with 74 Xeon 3.2 GHz cores.

While this computer cannot presently be compared directly with other top supercomputers around the world, it's theoretical top processing speed is at least three times that of the current #1, IBM's "BlueGene."

The system was presented to the public last Saturday at the Institute's lab in Yokohama.