In news sure to provoke a flamewar, The New York Times is reporting that an American military supercomputer "Roadrunner," has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second. Why a flamewar? Because part of the machine's guts come from the PlayStation 3.

The world's fastest computer contains 116,640 processor cores, with 12,960 chips that are an improved version of the Cell processor at the heart of the PlayStation 3.  According to the NY Times, "The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations."

Roadrunner consumes around the power required by a large suburban shopping center and requires three separate programming tools because it has three types of processors. Programmers have to figure out how to keep all of the 116,640 processor cores in the machine occupied simultaneously in order for it to run.

On a top-secret tour, I typed "10: Print 'Stephen Rulez!' 20: Goto 10" into the Roadrunner, and it totally printed "Stephen Rulez" over a hundred times a minute! That's fast!

New York Times: Military Supercomputer Sets Record