A supercomputer built with parts made for a Sony PlayStation has become the fastest system in the world.

IBM's Roadrunner machine is the first computer to process at the 1 petaflops level, moving the industry into a realm of unprecedented computing power.

The Roadrunner is capable of carrying out 1.026 quadrillion - just over a thousand trillion - calculations per second, making it twice as fast as the IBM Blue Gene system, which itself is three times faster than the leading contenders of the current top 500 list of worldwide supercomputer.

The power of Roadrunner is said to be roughly equivalent to the power of 100,000 of the most powerful laptops on the market. IBM said yesterday that it would take a stack of laptops 1.5miles high to equal Roadrunner's performance.

Later this year, the £100m system will be installed in the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where it was devised, to monitor nuclear weapons.

Scientists were briefed to develop the Roadrunner as traditional solutions for increasing supercomputer performance, such as miniaturising circuits and using faster clocks, could no longer provide the improvements required as systems got faster and faster.

In the past 10 years, supercomputer power has increased about 1000 times.