The U.S. Department of Energy plans to use a new hybrid supercomputer codeveloped by IBM and the Los Alamos National Laboratory to simulate U.S. nuclear-weapons performance. Code-named “Roadrunner,” the $100 million machine will be capable of performing 1,500 trillion computational operations per second (1.5 petaflops), which is three times faster than the largest supercomputer currently in use.
IBM executives say Roadrunner, which is twice as fast as IBM’s trailblazing Blue Gene supercomputer, has the computing power of 100,000 of today’s most powerful laptops. According to IBM Vice President David Turek, the new supercomputer represents the first significant manifestation of what Big Blue calls hybrid computing.
“At its center are very conventional kinds of microprocessors from AMD — the kinds of microprocessors that you’ll find in laptops and servers,” Turek said. “But surrounding this are a large number of chips known as a Cell Broadband Engine — the same kind of chips that you find in the Sony PlayStation 3.”
World’s First Hybrid Computer
Roadrunner, which is housed in 288 refrigerator-sized racks and occupies 6,000 square feet of space, integrates 80 terabytes of memory with 6,948 dual-core AMD Opteron chips as well as 12,960 Cell Broadband Engines. The eight cores within each Cell chip function as “vector engines that can produce significant computational capability for the kind of program that we are using for Roadrunner,” said IBM Vice President Bijan Davari.
To scale the platform’s capabilities upward in a space- and power-efficient manner, IBM brought in hundreds of technical experts in all aspects of software, packaging, cooling and overall system design. “To get the maximum performance from any software application you have to optimize it for the architecture its going to be running on,” said Matthew Wilkins, a principal analyst at iSuppli. “So if they are gaining this sort of…