Boffins at IBM have nearly finished the Roadrunner supercomputer, which they think will be double the speed of the today's fastest machine. IBM says the latest version of IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer will break the petaflop barrier any day now.

The new supercomputer will be used at the U.S .Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory to work on national security problems, run annual tests of various nuclear weapons systems and predict long-term climate changes.

There is some pressure on IBM to succeed, as the performance contract calls for the new Roadrunner to reach the petaflop performance level.

It will knock IBM's BlueGene system off the top of the number one slot in the Top 500 supercomputer list for the first time in two years. BlueGene runs at 478 teraflops, which is half the speed.

This new version of Roadrunner runs Linux and gets its hefty power boost by adding the Cell chips, originally designed jointly by IBM, Toshiba and Sony, for the latter's PlayStation 3, to the Opteron base.