Europe has its first 1 petaflop supercomputer

While it's not going to challenge China's Fermi-powered 2.5 petaflop Tianhe-1 supercomputer any time soon, the joint project between supercomputer specialist Bull and the Military Applications Division of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission is now officially the fastest supercomputer in Europe.

Based around 17,480 Intel Xeon 7500-series processors, the room-filling supercomputer packs 140,000 RAM modules into its chassis in order to offer a total memory capacity of 300TB. For storage, the system is backed by a whopping 20PB - that's petabytes - of disk capacity, with benchmarks demonstrating data transfer rates of around 500GB/s.