The U.S. Department of Energy and IBM announced the “Roadrunner”, a $100 million supercomputer which is the first machine capable of executing more than 1 quadrillion (1,000 trillion) floating point operations per second or one petaflop. The roadrunner is about twice as fast as the current supercomputing record holder.

The U.S. Department of Energy said that Roadrunner will provide calculations for nuclear security and scientific research. The Roadrunner computer, now housed at the IBM research laboratory in Poughkeepsie, New York, will be moved next month to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

The interconnecting system occupies 6,000 square feet with 57 miles of fiber optics and weighs 500,000 pounds. The roadrunner consists of 6,948 dual-core computer chips and 12,960 IBM cell engines which power Sony’s PlayStation 3 video game machine, it has 80 terabytes of memory and it runs Red Hat Linux.

It would take 100,000 of today’s fastest laptops — which would reach 1.5 miles into the sky if you’re the stacking sort — to equal Roadrunner’s computational power. Engineering difficulties, zoning issues, and insurance costs would probably preclude the creation of such a laptop tower, however.

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