Sony is running late with the PSP launch.

This has got to be a body blow for the company notwithstanding the announcement today that IBM is on track, using the Sony 'cell' chip that is at the heart of the PSP, to build a new supercomputer.

The new supercomputer, codenamed Roadrunner, is expected to be able to execute at four times the speed of the no.1 supercomputer listed in the Top 500, the IBM BlueGene/L at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which has been clocked at more than 280 teraflops (280 trillion floating point operations per second).

If it achieves its expected performance, Roadrunner will be the first computer in history to enter the petaflop (quadrillion operations per second) class.

The supercomputer is going to live at Los Alamos and be used to model nuclear aging. The PSP is also being planned to be networked by some people in the domestic environment to simulate supercomputer performance. So soon gamers will be able to contribute their downtime to research!