On Wednesday, IBM made history with the hybrid supercomputer it built for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Los Alamos National Lab. The Roadrunner burned its way into the Top500 supercomputer record book as the most powerful system in the world — by a wide margin.
Roadrunner’s sustained performance of 1.02 petaFLOPS (1.02 quadrillion calculations per second) puts the system in a class of its own — more than three times faster than the nearest non-IBM system.
The official results were reported during the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany, where the biannual listing of the world’s Top500 supercomputer sites was released.
“IBM’s Roadrunner and the Blue Gene systems that dominate the top 10 are all based on the technologies coming out of the company’s Power Systems group,” said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT Research. “Hands down, from a pure performance perspective, those systems blow away most anything else on the list.”
Hybrid Architecture
The Roadrunner gets its world-leading power from 12,240 IBM PowerXCell 8i Cell Broadband Engine processors — derived from chips that power some of today’s most popular video-game consoles. More than 6,500 AMD Opteron Dual-Core processors perform basic compute functions, freeing the IBM PowerXCell chips for the math-intensive calculations that are their specialty.
This hybrid architecture, which optimizes the strength of multiple types of processors, is an IBM hallmark. The design is analogous to that of a hybrid car with similar benefits. For example, if the NNSA supercomputer were built with standard x86 chips alone, the system would have been significantly larger and would have required much more power.
While the Roadrunner will be used to ensure the reliability and safety of the nation’s nuclear-weapons stockpile, it also sets the pace for future research in a variety of scientific and commercial fields, including biotech, alternative energy, climate change, and physics. IBM said…