Monday, November 17, 2008
Roadrunner
Say hello to the fastest computer in the world, or more accurately, the fastest computer in the world that you are allowed to know about.
The IBM Roadrunner is a "hybrid" supercomputer, consisting of 12,240 Cell Broadband Engines, each similar to the graphics processor in the Sony Playstation 3, and 6,562 dual-core AMD Opteron CPUs, all connected together with 55 miles of fiber optic cable wrapped around 98 terabytes of memory. It runs a version of the Red Hat Linux Operating System.
The computer is housed in 278 refrigerator-sized cabinets called "BladeCenters". It requires 5,200 square feet of floor space and enough electrical power to run your neighborhood.
What does all this technology get you? Somewhere north of 1 petaflop of computing power, or about one thousand trillion floating point operations per second. This is enough motive juice to push enormous oceans of data, driving super-complex simulations in real time with no sweat.
The Roadrunner cost $100 million to design and build, and will be used on tasks like nuclear weapon decay rate simulation, advanced climate modeling, and astronomy with a little genome research thrown in for good measure.
You might think that a computer of this stature would retain it's title of "speed king" for some time, but that will almost certainly not be the case. In the world of advanced supercomputers, there is always a challenger waiting in the wings to dethrone the top dog.
In fact, the previous number-one system, the Cray Jaguar XT, held it's speed title for only one week.
It will be interesting to see who knocks the Roadrunner off it's perch next week.
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5 comments:
I'm working on it. Almost done.
I went to see the BIG computer at IBM on 8 mile Rd in 1969. It took up almost the whole floor of that building and probably had about 500kb of memory.
I have that exact computer in the basement.
Where is that one located?
US Department of Energy, it's located at Los Alamos - that's why it's named after the NM state bird.
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