IBM's Roadrunner Breaks Supercomputer Record - InformationWeek

The U.S. Department of Energy and IBM on Monday that the new Roadrunner supercomputer is the first such as machine capable of executing more than than 1 quadrillion (1,000 trillion) floating point trading operations per second, a calculation charge per unit otherwise known as 1 petaflop.

The $100 million machine is about twice as fast as the current supercomputing record holder, system at Lawrence Mary Ashton Rice Livermore National Lab.

More Hardware Insights
White Papers

Reports

U.S. Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman said that Roadrunner will supply computations for atomic security and scientific research.

The machine will be housed at the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) Los Alamos National Laboratory. Occupying 6,000 foursquare feet and weighing 500,000 pounds, it's not likely to be moved to fulfill redecorating whims.

IBM Roadrunner a loanblend supercomputer. It compounds 12,960 IBM Cell chips, which powerfulness Sony's PlayStation3 picture game machine, with 6,948 AMD Opteron chips, and 80 TBS of memory. It runs Red Hat Linux.

IBM qualifies Roadrunner's thirst for energy (3.9 megawatts) as miserly, noting that at 376 million computations per watt, it's likely to rank at the top of the Green 500 listing of energy efficient supercomputers, when that listing is updated later this month. IBM's Blue Gene throws first topographic point on the , with 357.23 million computations per watt.

It would take 100,000 of today's fastest laptop computers -- which would attain 1.5 statute miles into the sky if you're the stacking kind -- to be Roadrunner's computational power. Technology difficulties, zoning issues, and coverage costs would probably prevent the creative activity of such as a laptop computer tower, however.

According to IBM, supercomputing powerfulness have increased 1,000 fold up in the past 10 years. In what can be seen either as a swipe at Motor City or as pridefulness in Moore's Law, IBM detects that if the internal burning engine improved at a similar rate, autos would be getting 200,000 statute miles to the gallon.