Roadrunner is a supercomputer built by IBM at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA. Currently the world's fastest computer, the US$133-million Roadrunner is designed for a peak performance of 1.7 petaflops, achieving 1.026 on May 25, 2008, and to be the world's first TOP500 Linpack sustained 1.0 petaflops system.
It is a one-of-a-kind supercomputer, built from commodity parts, with
many novel design features. IBM built the computer for the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration. It is a hybrid design with 12,960 IBM PowerXCell 8i CPUs and 6,480 AMD Opteron dual-core processors in specially designed server blades connected by Infiniband. The Roadrunner uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux along with Fedora as its operating systems and is managed with xCAT distributed computing software. It also uses the Open MPI Message Passing Interface implementation.
Roadrunner occupies approximately 6,000 square feet (560 m2)
and became operational in 2008. |
|
The DOE plans to use the computer for simulating how nuclear materials
age in order to predict whether the USA's aging arsenal of nuclear
weapons is safe and reliable. Other uses for the Roadrunner include the
sciences, financial, automotive and aerospace industries.
Roadrunner differs from many contemporary supercomputers in that it is a
hybrid system, using two different processor architectures. Usually
supercomputers only use one, since such a design is easier to design and
program for. To realise the full potential of Roadrunner, all software
will have to be written specially for this hybrid architecture. The
hybrid design consists of
dual-core
Opteron server processors manufactured by
AMD utilizing the standard
AMD64
architecture. Attached to
each Opteron core is a
Cell processor manufactured
by IBM using
Power Architecture
technology. As a supercomputer, the Roadrunner is considered an Opteron
cluster with Cell accelerators, as each node consists of a Cell attached
to an Opteron core and the Opterons to each other. |