The world's first sustained petaflop supercomputer, Roadrunner, has been shut down by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, ending its five year run of trend setting and virus modelling. Record breaking for its near 1.5 petaflop peak performance, Road Runner also made waves in 2008 by being incredibly …

If you believe that competition is a good thing, then the US Department of Energy is going about the problem of ‘How best to construct tomorrow's super computers' in the right way. KitGuru dons flip-flops and heads off to consider the impact of PetaFlops. While PC labs across the world …

Around 10 years ago, a bunch of threads kicked off on science forums around the world, with boffins (pro and amateur) discussing the idea of a computer-based Einstein in the future. A decade ago, most of the contributors thought that the answer was in some kind of amazing new layout …