IBM’s Roadrunner – Fastest Super Computer

The new Roadrunner supercomputer is the first such machine capable of executing more than 1 quadrillion (1,000 trillion) floating point operations per second, a computation rate otherwise known as 1 petaflop. Roadrunner – IBM’s latest offing in the Super Computer arena tops the Top500 Super Computing list.  The 32nd edition of the list of the world’s TOP500 supercomputers was released on November 14, with the 1.105 petaflop/s Roadrunner system holding on to the top spot it first achieved in June 2008.

Roadrunner, will be delivered to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in summer 2008.

The $100 million machine is about twice as fast as the current supercomputing record holder, IBM’s Blue Gene system at Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

It would take 100,000 of today’s fastest laptops — which would reach 1.5 miles into the sky if you’re the stacking sort — to equal Roadrunner’s computational power. Engineering difficulties, zoning issues, and insurance costs would probably preclude the creation of such a laptop tower, however.

In total, the computer connects 6,948 dual-core AMD Opteron chips on IBM Model LS21 blade servers, in addition to 12,960 Cell engines on IBM Model QS22 blade servers.

Standard processing–such as system I/O–is handled by the Opteron processors. Mathematical and CPU-intensive elements are directed to the cell processors.

The system has 80 terabytes of memory and is housed in 288 refrigerator-size IBM BladeCenter racks taking up 6,000 square feet. Roadrunner’s 10,000 connections–both Infiniband and Gigabit Ethernet–require 57 miles of fiber-optic cable and weigh a whopping 500,000 pounds.