Supercomputer’s Achievement Demonstrates LANL’s Key Role in American Innovation: U.S. Representative Tom Udall, D-N.M., today released the following statement lauding LANL's Roadrunner Supercomputer’s feat of breaking the "Petaflops Barrier." The computer achieved 1.026 quadrillion floating-point operations per second, making it the fastest computer on earth. A petaflops is 1 quadrillion operations per second, and scientists have long considered achieving that speed a goal with important implications for the world's ability to model complex phenomena using computers. The Roadrunner, developed by IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory and housed at Los Alamos, is more than twice as fast as the world's second-fastest computer: "I want to congratulate LANL for achieving another important milestone. Once again, LANL scientists have opened a new chapter in the history of human knowledge. Their achievement will help to keep America safe from the threats we face in the new millennium: from global terror to global epidemics. I have always advocated for the Roadrunner program because it represents the capacity of American ingenuity to make the world a better, safer place. "The Roadrunner supercomputer will help ensure the safety and reliability of America's nuclear arsenal. It will help us to model the spread of disease to keep our citizens healthy. And it will help us better understand our energy challenges. America's strength depends on our ability to constantly push back the frontier of intellectual discovery and lead the world in innovation. Roadrunner's processing capacity is not just an incredible achievement in itself; it is a building block that will allow us to make even more exciting discoveries in the future. With prime access to this unique tool, LANL and New Mexico are poised to play a key role in the many scientific breakthroughs that the Roadrunner program will make possible in the coming years. "The Roadrunner's success should remind us of the important role LANL must play in keeping America safe and finding solutions to the many difficult problems we face. Since World War II, LANL has helped to make the world a more peaceful place by keeping America strong and developing innovative solutions to our national security challenges. Today, we need LANL more than ever. Increasingly, the challenges we face demand innovation, not confrontation. They demand exactly the skills that LANL scientists, more than any other group, use every day. I hope that the Roadrunner program will be the beginning of an expanded role and a bright future for LANL."