The ‘Roadrunner’ system at Los Alamos National Lab was the first computer system to break the sustained Petaflop barrier on the Top500 list; achieving this even before it was fully complete! Its innovative system design combines commodity general purpose x86 and PowerXCell 8i (a derivative of the Cell Broadband Engine found in the Sony PLAYSTATION 3 games console) processors. New software was developed to allow this unusual architecture to be supported for a wide range of HPC codes. This session will share some of the experiences of the Roadrunner project together with those gathered building alternative hybrid systems architectures for commercial HPC systems and give attendees an insight into the realms of what is possible with the next generations of hybrid systems designs. Traditional ways of building supercomputers are proving to be increasingly unsustainable, making these hybrid architectures the approach of choice for future supercomputing designs.