Meep meep. The PlayStation 3's powerful hardware does it again, contributing its powerful Cell Broadband Engine to create the world's fastest supercomputer, er... again. Named the Roadrunner, this new supercomputer runs at speeds exceeding one petaflop - that is, one thousand trillion calculations per second. Let's see Wile E. Coyote try to catch up with that. Watch a mini-documentary of the supercomputer in the full article.

 How do you get bacteria to solve math problems for you? Placing them in a life and death situation is one way. In order for them to be able to withstand the drugs, researchers injected these tiny life forms with proteins that will act like variables in an equation. Learn more in the full article up next.

Size does matter, even in the world of small things. Scientists at Purdue University have been able to take a three-dimensional image of a virus at a resolution of 4.5 angstroms. An angstrom is 0.1 nanometer long, or 1/10 billionth of a meter. So you can imagine that's quite an achievement. Check out the full article to see the magnified virus.

So what's to say that the next major tsunami event doesn't befall the Pacific Northwestern region this time? Researchers from the San Diego State University are currently looking into a study which will simulate the next "megathrust" disaster event by running several scenarios through the San Diego Supercomputer Center's DataStar supercomputer. You can find out more about the results of this study by reading the full article.

One of the world's fastest supercomputers, the Blue Gene/P, is powered by the PS3 CELL chip and has reached a speed of 280.6 teraflops. However, this is just a modicum of what the Institute for Advanced Architectures is planning: a computer that can use exaflops. An exaflop is a thousand times faster than a teraflop. That's faster than you can say "Leeroy Jenkins!" Oops, too slow. More in the full article.

Scientists have challenged Mother Nature by building a better plant - only theirs is a digital one. Researchers at the University of Illinois have built a simulation program for a SuperLeaf: it doesn't leap tall building in a single bound but its efficiency allows it to produce more leaves and fruit using the same amount of energy a normal leaf uses.

Now if only they can actually make the leaf... Read the full article for more details on SuperLeaf.

Look up. Do you see a thought bubble? Of course you don't. But zoom out a bit and imagine someone was watching you from his computer screen, seeing a thought bubble above your head indicating that you are reading this right now. It's the ultimate philosophical nightmare: we're not real, we're just a series of electric impulses darting about who think we're real. The old we're-just-brains-in-a-jar argument.

What are the chances of such a philosophical blackhole? Dr. Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, is quite specific on the number: "My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that, is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation."

Such a thought is not foreign to us who have played the Sims and watched "The Matrix". Paranoia aside, isn't it possible for us to be part of a program and not be aware of it? The tastes and smells, the joy and pains, all sensation is just electrical impulses in our heads. It's entirely possible that all these electrical impulses are done inside the processes of a super computer.

That's exactly what Bostrom suggests. An advanced race of "posthumans" have built a supercomputer that simulates their ancestors, ie, us:

I think it’s highly likely that civilization could endure to produce those supercomputers. And if owners of the computers were anything like the millions of people immersed in virtual worlds like Second Life, SimCity and World of Warcraft, they’d be running simulations just to get a chance to control history — or maybe give themselves virtual roles as Cleopatra or Napoleon.

This explains why there's suffering and misery in the world. It's being run by humans. Who hasn't let their Sims go hungry just to see what happens? (I killed Kenny! I'm a computer simulated bast****!)

This could be the most credible proof that the PlayStation 3 possesses formidable hardware: IBM's fastest supercomputer to date, Blue Gene/P, is juiced up by the same kind of processing chip that was originally designed for the Sony PS3.

Blue Gene/P is approximately 100,000 more powerful than a PC, just enough to make PlayStation 3 owners feel proud about their powerful machine. IBM's latest supercomputer can run about 1,000 trillion calculations per second, also termed as "petaflops".

Blue Gene/P's predecessor, the Blue Gene/L, is  used to protect nuclear weapons stockpile, and has already reached a calculating speed of 280.6 teraflops or trillions of calculations. "Blue Gene/P marks the evolution of the most powerful supercomputing platform the world has ever known," said Dave Turek, vice president of IBM's deep computing, about Blue Gene/P.

IBM possesses a remarkable supercomputer manufacturing portfolio: they have produced about 50% of existing 500 supercomputers, as well as providing CELL processors for PlayStation 3 and for the Blue Gene/P. IBM also has notable competition in the supercomputing industry with the likes of Sun, maker of the Constellation machines.

The first batch of Blue Gene/P are slated for use at the following institutions: the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council, and two unnamed US laboratories.