Energy inefficiency brings an end to 2008's record-breaking Roadrunner supercomputer

The fastest supercomputer of 2008 is being decommissioned today after setting record-breaking speeds five years ago. The IBM-built Roadrunner was the first machine to reach the notable performance target of 1 sustained petaflops -- equivalent to one million billion calculations per second. Though the machine is still one of the faster computers in the world, its power consumption is making it obsolete. The next-fastest supercomputer nearly matches Roadrunner's speeds with only about one-fifth of...