IBM Roadrunner Supercomputer Retires
April 1, 2013 10:04 AM
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Roadrunner supercomputer is still fast but can't match today's best
One certainty in the technology world is that computer technology advances quickly. What was once of the fastest computers in the world only a few years ago is today well down on the list of the world's top performers. A perfect example is the Roadrunner supercomputer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. When the supercomputer was installed in 2008, it was the world's fastest and the first supercomputer capable of breaking the petaflop (1 million billion calculations per second) barrier.
Roadrunner is still an incredibly fast supercomputer, but it was decommissioned Sunday. The supercomputer was operational for five years and was used in a wide variety of projects including providing key simulations for the Stockpile Stewardship Program and other unclassified scientific projects.
"Roadrunner exemplified stockpile stewardship: an excellent team integrating complex codes with advanced computing architectures to ensure a safe, secure and effective deterrent," said Chris Deeney, NNSA Assistant Deputy Administrator for Stockpile Stewardship. "Roadrunner and its successes have positioned us well to weather the technology changes on the HPC horizon as we implement stockpile modernization without recourse to underground testing."
Roadrunner uses a hybrid design with 6563 dual-core general-purpose AMD Opteron processors. Each of those processors was linked to a PowerXCell 8i processor, an enhanced version of the chip designed for the Sony PlayStation 3.
One reason that the supercomputer is being decommissioned has to do with the incredible amount of power it utilizes to achieve its impressive performance. While Roadrunner is now sitting around the 20th place on the list of the world's most powerful computers, modern computers use significantly less power for significantly more performance.
IBM had previously
supercomputers would reach the 20 petaflop range by 2012.
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RE: Just a question...
4/1/2013 11:04:58 AM
This thing was commissioned in 2008 which means its planning and build phase were 2007. Quad cores were available but were fairly new at the time so there may have been availability issues at the time. Also I think due to its design every Power processor had to be paired with an opteron so even if they had gone with quad cores they still would have had to purchase 6k of them. And for my final broad guess (because I have no idea how this system was designed) I think the Opteron processors were just there to feed data to the PowerXCell processors, they were likely not there to do any of the serious calculations.
RE: Just a question...
4/1/2013 11:13:02 AM
Ehh that wasn't how I originally understood it when DT first reported on it, but going back and reading the article, your hypothesis might be true.
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