Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 11 June 2008 09:29
IT Industry -
Strategy
Page 1 of 2
A hybrid supercomputer built by IBM for the US Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration more than doubles the speed of Blue Gene, previously the world's fastest. And it does so with the aid of the processor used in the Sony PlayStation 3.
The hybrid tag refers to the way Roadrunner
was designed to exploit the strengths of the Cell Broadband Engine as
well as conventional x86 chips from AMD. This is said to be a first in
supercomputer design.
Roadrunner features 12,960 Cell chips along with 6948 dual-core Opteron CPUs. Assembled from off-the-shelf IBM blade servers, the system is housed in 288 "refrigerator sized" racks.
The blades are configured in groups of three, comprising a pair of Cell
blades with one Opteron blade. The Cell chips handle the mathematical
and other CPU-intensive operations, while the Opterons take care of I/O
and other less arduous tasks. With 400 gigaflops (400 billion
floating-point operations per second) per tri-blade, the whole system
is rated at overone petaflop (one million billion calculations per
second).
IBM puts the processing capability into perspective by comparing it
with 100,000 of today's fastest laptops, or around 1000 of what was the
world's fastest supercomputer in 1998.
Not only is Roadrunner the world's fastest supercomputer, it is also
one of the most energy efficient. Performing 376 million calculations
per watt, IBM officials expect it to be one of the leaders in the next
Green 500 list.
What about the software? Please read on for the open source connection.
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