Computerworld

Features

The world’s fastest supercomputer
IBM, Los Alamos smash petaflop barrier.
Jon Brodkin (Network World) 16 June, 2008 10:05
  • 1 of 8
The world
The world's first petaflop machine is being delivered to Los Alamos National Laboratory, and will let scientists test the safety and reliability of America's nuclear bombs without the need for live tests.
The world's first petaflop machine is being delivered to Los Alamos National Laboratory, and will let scientists test the safety and reliability of America's nuclear bombs without the need for live tests.A petaflop is a measure of speed equivalent to one thousand trillion calculations per second. IBM and Los Alamos teamed up to build Roadrunner, the world's fastest supercomputer with 1.5 petaflops, three times faster than the previous champ. Pictured is lead engineer Don Grice of IBM inspecting Roadrunner at Big Blue's US plant. Roadrunner will be trucked to Los Alamos in New Mexico in August.Roadrunner is a breakthrough in hybrid computing, combining AMD microprocessors found in standard laptops and servers with the IBM Cell Broadband Engine chips that power Sony's PS3 gaming console.This chip "contains a Power PC compute core that oversees all the system operations and a set of eight simple processing elements, known as SPEs, that are optimized for both image processing and arithmetic operations at the heart of numerical simulations," Los Alamos says. "Each is specialized to work on multiple data items at a time (a process called vector processing, or SIMD), which is very efficient for repetitive mathematical operations on well-defined groups of data."Roadrunner is more efficient than most supercomputers, delivering 376 million calculations per watt, according to IBM. That should be enough to place Roadrunner among the most energy-efficient systems on the Green 500 list coming out later this month, IBM says. Pictured are the cooling towers at Los Alamos, which dissipate the heat generated by power-hungry supercomputers.Costing $100 million, Roadrunner combines 6,948 dual-core AMD Opteron chips and 12,960 Cell engines, all housed in IBM blade servers. Roadrunner weights 500,000 pounds, and has 10,000 Infiniband and Gigabit Ethernet connections requiring 57 miles of fiber optic cable (pictured).In addition to nuclear safety testing, Roadrunner calculations could determine the influence of radiation flow on light signals from the exploding stars known as supernovae.Roadrunner is capable of many other complex experiments, from testing the effects of drugs on the human body to predicting fluctuations in the stock market. What would you use Roadrunner for?

Comments

Post new comment

Login or register to link comments to your user profile, or you may also post a comment without being logged in.
The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
Enter the fully qualified URL, eg. http://www.example.com/
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

More information about formatting options

 

Computerworld Webinar

Thursday, June 11th, 2009
10:30am EST (Sydney, Australia)
Screening at your PC

Computerworld is hosting a 30 minute live webinar to help you to learn how unified communications can save you money, foster innovation and business agility by making it easier for people to find, reach and collaborate with one another.

Register Now

Most Popular
IT Media Releases
Most Popular Whitepapers
Computerworld Community Comments
Videos
Most Commented
Get a job Careerone
Whitepaper


Read Whitepaper

Business Processes and Customers - Difficult Domains to Integrate

Get more out of CRM, integrate BPM with customer needs. This BPM Focus whitepaper discusses the problems with traditional CRM and explains the best practice scenarios for better customer interaction.

Enterprise IT Buyer's Guide
Find Technology Vendors Fast
 
Find vendors by name | Find by category
Sponsored Links
 
Send Us E-mail | Privacy Policy
Features List | Media Kit | Advertising | Contact Us
Copyright 2009 IDG Communications. ABN 14 001 592 650. All rights reserved.
Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of IDG Communications is prohibited.