IBM Builds World's Fastest Supercomputer
By CXOtoday Staff
Mumbai, Jun 16, 2008

In 2006, the US Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration selected Los Alamos National Laboratory as the development site for the world's fastest supercomputer - Roadrunner.

Designed and built by IBM, Roadrunner performs operations at the speed of 1 pentaflop, i.e. 1 million billion calculations per second. This is nearly twice as fast as the IBM Blue Gene system at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, the earlier holder of the world's fastest supercomputer title.

Roadrunner cost about US $100 million. It will primarily be used to ensure the safety and reliability of the United States' nuclear weapons stockpile. It will also be used for research into astronomy, energy, human genome science and climate change.

Roadrunner is the world's first hybrid supercomputer. In a first-of-a-kind design, it uses the Cell Broadband Engine that was originally designed for video game platforms such as the Sony Playstation 3. This engine will work in conjunction with x86 processors from AMD.

Made from commercial parts, in total, Roadrunner connects 6,562 dual-core AMD Opteron chips as well as 12,240 cell chips (on IBM Model QS22 blade servers). The Roadrunner system has 98 terabytes of memory, and is housed in 278 refrigerator-sized, IBM BladeCenter racks occupying 5,200 square feet. Its 10,000 connections - both Infiniband and gigabit Ethernet -- require 55 miles of fiber optic cable. Roadrunner weighs 500,000 lbs. Companies that contributed components and technology include -- Emcore, Flextronics, Mellanox, and Voltaire.

Two IBM QS22 blade servers and 1 IBM LS21 blade server are combined into a specialized "tri-blade" configuration for Roadrunner. The machine is composed of a total of 3,060 tri-blades. Standard processing (e.g., file system I/O) is handled by the Opteron processors. Mathematically and CPU-intensive elements are directed to the cell processors. Each tri-blade unit can run at 400 billion operations per second (400 gigaflops).

Roadrunner was loaded onto 21 tractor trailer trucks when it was delivered to Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico.

Roadrunner operates on open-source Linux software from Red Hat. Compared to most traditional supercomputer designs, Roadrunner's hybrid format sips power (2.35 megawatts) and delivers world-leading efficiency - 437 million calculations per watt. IBM expects Roadrunner to place among the top energy-efficient systems later in June when the official "Green 500" list of supercomputers is issued.

IBM is developing new software to make cell-powered hybrid computing broadly accessible. Roadrunner's massive software effort targets commercial applications for hybrid supercomputing. With corporate and academic partners, IBM is developing an open-source ecosystem that will bring hybrid supercomputing to financial services, energy exploration and medical imaging industries among others.

Applications for cell-based hybrid supercomputing include calculating cause and effect in capital markets in real-time -- supercomputers in financial services can instantly predict the ripple effect of a stock market change throughout the markets. In medicine, complex 3-D renderings of tissues and bone structures will happen in real-time, as patients are being examined.

Roadrunner operates at speeds exceeding one petaflop i.e. 1 thousand trillion calculations per second or 1 million billion calculations per second. This is roughly equivalent to the combined computing power of 100,000 of today's fastest laptop computers. A stack of laptops 1.5 miles high would be required to equal Roadrunner's performance.

Another way of looking at is, if we take the entire population of the earth, -- about six billion - each working a handheld calculator at the rate of 1 calculation per second, it would take us 46 years to do what Roadrunner can do in 1 day!


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