Computers

Scientists at the Los Alamos government weapons lab have managed to build the world’s fastest computer. The computer has the ability to sustain 1,000 trillion operations in a single second.

IBM’s Energy Department announced their new breakthrough Monday and stated that the computer will be used to help maintain the country’s nuclear weapons stockpile.

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman says the new computer, named Roadrunner, also will be used to help solve global energy problems and “open new windows of knowledge” in basic research.

IBM scientists believe that stacked processors have a much higher power density than most nuclear reactors. The amount of heat that processors with processing circuits, cores, and other components are extremely high. One of the large challenges that they have had is trying to cool it off.

Apple has something special planned for this year’s WWDC and it will come in the form of the brand new Mac OS X 10.6. If things stay on schedule the new computer will be shipping out January of 2009.

The WWDC – Apple Worldwide Developers Conference – will be held June 9-13 in San Francisco. There Apple will be revealing some pertinent and rather exciting (according to rumors) news about the new Mac OS X Leopard.