roadrunner

roadrunner

 or chaparral cock

Roadrunner (Geococcyx californianus)

(credit: Russ Kinne—Photo Researchers/EB Inc.)

Either of two species of terrestrial cuckoo, especially Geococcyx californianus (family Cuculidae), of Mexican and southwestern U.S. deserts. About 22 in. (56 cm) long, they have streaked brown-and-white plumage, a short shaggy crest, bare blue and red skin behind the eyes, stout bluish legs, and a long tail carried at an angle. Clumsy, weak fliers, they prefer to run. Using their stout bill, they pound insects, lizards, and snakes to death, then swallow the victim head first. The lesser roadrunner (G. velox), of Mexico and Central America, is smaller, buffier, and less streaked.

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Roadrunner

The first supercomputer to reach one petaFLOPS (one quadrillion floating point operations per second). Running under Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Roadrunner comprises 12,960 Cell chips, 6,948 dual-core AMD chips and 80 terabytes of memory. Developed by IBM for Los Alamos National Labs and achieving its record performance in 2008, Roadrunner weighs in at 250 tons, much larger than the behemoth computers of the 1950s. It takes up an area approximately 100 by 120 feet. Although Roadrunner soaks up nearly four megawatts of power, its performance is that of 100,000 fast laptop computers and is actually more energy efficient than many of its peers. See supercomputer and Cell chip.