In the Warner Bros. cartoons, the Road Runner dashed across a vast desert landscape continually outmaneuvering its archrival, Wile E. Coyote, thanks to incredible speed and quick thinking.

IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer will also find a home in a desert landscape--Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico--and will also rely on speed and quick thinking, or in this case calculations, to keep ahead of its competition. The massive system is poised to become one of <A HREF="http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Infrastructure/IBM-Aims-for-a-Petaflop/?kc=EWKNLNAVFEA1">the world's fastest high-performance computers,</A> according to IBM officials.