World's Fastest Computer: 1.026 Petaflops

You mean you don't know what a "petaflop" is? Welcome to the club: it's a million billion calculations per second, which is faster than the rise in gas prices lately... Los Alamos National Laboratory here in New Mexico just accomplished the feat in their new "Roadrunner" super-computer, using, of all things, 12,960 of Sony's new PlayStation 3 chips (yes, the same one your kids use in their games!) mixed with 6,948 AMD chips. The monstrosity occupies 6K square feet, has 57 miles of fiber optics, weighs 500K pounds, and has 80 terabytes of memory stored in 288 refrigerator-sized racks. I give you all these statistics so you can request one in your hospital's 2009 hardware budget...Â

Actually, the top 10 HIS vendors have already announced plans to incorporate Roadrunner into their offerings:- McKesson will use one to store their product brochures - Cerner is using one for their latest implementation schedules - Siemens is using one to announce Soarian release plans - Epic is using one for their latest price quotes - GE is using one for their inter-product interfaces - Eclipsys is using one to make XA ".net" run faster - Meditech is using one to catalogue the features in Release 6 - Keane is using it to optimze product permutations - QuadraMed is using one for their revised financial reports - CPSI uses one to handle their client list