Breaking the petraflop barrier
IBM has confirmed that the 'Roadrunner' computer, which was built using some components originally developed for the PS3, has become the world's fastest computer capable of processing a petaflop of data, or 1,000 trillion calculations per second.Named after the New Mexico State bird, the $50 million government computer utilises the Cell Broadband Engine and traditional computer chips.
Roadrunner, which is currently located at the Los Alamos National Laboratory of the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration, will be used for research into energy,astronomy, human genome science and climate change, as well as assessing the reliability of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile.
U.S. Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman said, "Roadrunner will not only play a key role in maintaining the U.S. nuclear deterrent, it will also contribute to solving our global energy Relevant Products/Services challenges and open new windows of knowledge in the basic scientific research fields."
In a press release IBM state that:
According to the data sheet, Roadrunner:Roadrunner's petaflop performance is roughly equivalent to the combined computing power of 100,000 of today's fastest laptop computers. That's a stack of laptops 1.5 miles high. It would take the entire population of the earth -- about 6 billion people – each working a handheld calculator at the rate of one second per calculation, more than 46 years to do what Roadrunner can do in one day.
Check out the fact sheet overleafConnects 6,948 dual-core AMD Opteron chips (on IBM Model LS21 blade servers) as well as 12,960 Cell engines (on IBM Model QS22 blade servers). The Roadrunner system has 80 terabytes of memory, and is housed in 288 refrigerator-sized, IBM BladeCenter racks occupying 6,000 square feet. Its 10,000 connections – both Infiniband and Gigabit Ethernet -- require 57 miles of fiber optic cable. Roadrunner weighs 500,000 lbs. Companies that contributed components and technology include; Emcore, Flextronics, Mellanox and Voltaire.
Source :: Computer World
