When you're dealing with nuclear weapons, figuring out problems and figuring them out fast is Job One. For scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, that means having the most computing power possible.

For about a year, the US federal security research facility in Los Alamos, has used an IBM-built supercomputer, dubbed Roadrunner, whose peak performance is about 70 teraflops.

Today, that's not enough. So Los Alamos is getting ready to fire up a new incarnation of IBM's Roadrunner, a hybrid machine that will provide the scientists with a lot more power -- 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second -- once it's installed this fall.

The $200 million hybrid system still runs the AMD Opteron chips of the original Roadrunner but adds Cell chips that were first designed for the PlayStation 3 gaming console. In tests conducted this spring, the new supercomputer became the first machine to break the petaflop barrier.

Much of the performance boost came from the Cell chip, developed jointly by IBM, Toshiba and Sony Computer Entertainment, to handle high-performance computations for video games. That also makes it will suited to handle other complex calculations, and "bitwise" operations like generating random numbers.

The well-publicized tests have attracted the attention of IT managers in a variety of industries who increasingly need significant performance boosts without the corresponding rise in energy demands.

The companies that are generally out in front of new technologies -- financial services firms, pharmaceutical manufacturers and petroleum giants -- are expected to be the first to take on hybrid computing commercially.

The hardware is very costly, and significant work is often required to adapt software to the technology, leaving early adoption to large firms with big budgets to take on projects that push the envelope.

At this point, a major retailer probably wouldn't want to use a large hybrid system to run a network backbone. But for, say, a Wall Street company that needs to gauge risk and price derivatives, a hybrid-enhanced performance boost may be just what the CIO ordered.

Steve Conway, an analyst at research firm IDC, noted that some companies have turned to multicore processors for added performance but have found that applications and calculations are running more slowly than they did using single-core chips.

"[Performance issues] are causing a real shift in the capability to get the work done," he said. "It's no secret that microprocessor speeds stalled out a few years ago. [Computer makers] need to do something, [so] they're adding accelerators."