IBM Roadrunner - The Fastest Supercomputer!!!

The Roadrunner

The Roadrunner is a supercomputer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA. Currently the world's fastest supercomputer, the US$133 million Roadrunner is designed for a performance level of 1.026 petaflops peak, which it reached on May 25, 2008, to be the world's first TOP500 Linpack sustained 1.0 petaflops system.

IBM built the computer for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). It is a hybrid design with 12,960 IBM PowerXCell 8i CPUs and 6,912 AMD Opteron dual-core processors in specially designed TriBlades connected by Infiniband.

The Roadrunner uses the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system and is managed with xCATdistributed computing software. Roadrunner uses 3.9 megawatts of power, which is enough to power 39,000 100-watt light bulbs. It takes up 6,000 square feet, uses 57 miles of fiber optic cable and weighs in at 500,000 pounds. What is even more astounding, it uses enough power to bake 20,000 medium 4-topping pizzas per hour, navigate Yahoo for 3 weeks before becoming clogged with spam, porn and adware, and find truly interesting and useful content on AOL in under two weeks. An anticipated upgrade will give Roadrunner enough computing power to boot Microsoft Vista in two out of three attempts without crashing... It became operational in 2008... (Curious techies like me may try peeping into the numerous links I've provided for details.. ;-D)

DOE plans to use the computer for simulating how nuclear materials age and whether the aging nuclear weapon arsenal of the United States is safe and reliable. Other uses for the supercomputer include the sciences, financial, automotive and aerospace industries.

Roadrunner will be housed at NNSA’s Los Alamos National Laboratory(DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration). The laboratory worked collaboratively with IBM, the manufacturer, for six years to deliver a novel computer architecture that can meet the nation’s evolving national security needs. The result has redefined the frontier of supercomputing, not only by crossing the one petaflop threshold, but also by introducing a new paradigm for the future.

Most nuclear weapons in the U.S. stockpile were produced anywhere from 30 to 40 years ago, and no new nuclear weapons have been produced since the end of the Cold War. Since US President George H.W. Bush ended underground nuclear testing in 1992, the U.S. has relied on science-based research and development to extend the lifetime of the current weapons in the stockpile. NNSA’s ability to model the extraordinary complexity of nuclear weapons systems is essential to maintaining confidence in the performance of the aging stockpile.

A “flop” is an acronym meaning floating-point operations per second. One petaflop is 1,000 trillion operations per second i.e. 10¹⁵(try putting 15 zeros after 1 and count the number.. :D) floating-point operations per second... To put this into perspective, if each of the 6 billion people on earth had a hand calculator and worked together on a calculation 24 hours per day, 365 days a year, it would take 46 years to do what Roadrunner would do in one day...!

But just an afterthought...

While I agree this is a major accomplishment in the world of computing it seems to be a waste of an incredible tool. I am an IT professional and I am in awe of this computer, but to have the US government spending $100 billion to run more nuclear explosion simulations is irresponsible at best... With the gasoline prices skyrocketing, shouldn’t we be using this computer to help us figure out how and if we can make cold fusion work? Sounds like a lot of "good-use" of this computer to me....

ps: Credit again to Wikipedia and the various links on its Roadrunner page that gave me all the info I needed to create this post...