Meet Roadrunner

Maximum Geekdom -- off the charts... I waited a few days after the initial announcements until more information was released. Roadrunner was commissioned by LANL (the Las Alamos National Laboratories) and built by IBM and it is the first machine to break the peta-flop barrier, something that was not expected for quite a few years from now... One peta-flop is one floating point mathematical operation per second with these zeros to the right: 000,000,000,000,000 That is one thousand trillion complex floating point calculations per second. The Daily Tech has the story:

New Military Supercomputer Breaks Performance Record
A new supercomputer in the U.S. has broken a barrier that many thought wouldn�t be broken for years to come. A new supercomputer-- dubbed Roadrunner-- has broken the petaflop barrier. Roadrunner was designed by engineers and scientists at IBM and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Ultimately, Roadrunner will be placed into a classified environment where it will be used to simulate what effects aging has on the stockpile of nuclear weapons the U.S. has in its arsenal. The problem it will work on is modeling how aging nuclear weapons behave the first fraction of a second during an explosion. Before beginning its nuclear weapons research, Roadrunner will be used to model the effects of global warming.

The Roadrunner supercomputer costs $133 million and is built using chips from both consumer electronics and more common server processors.

The more common server processors are not mentioned but I am looking at the numbers and the article mentions these tidbits:

Roadrunner has 12,960 chips that are an improved version of the...

-- and --

In total, Roadrunner has 116,640 processing cores

Now looking at the numbers (something I do a centi-flop rate) -- I subtract 12,960 of the sooper-seekret chips from the total processor count of 116,640 which gives me 103,680 "common server processors". Divide this by eight and we are back at 12,960 again. My guess on the architecture is that we have 12,960 individual rack mount systems of the "pizza-box" configuration with eight CPUs (this is actually a very nice "sweet spot" for enterprise scalability but that is another story) and each system houses one of the sooper-seekret chips. The chip in question -- here is the full quote:

Roadrunner has 12,960 chips that are an improved version of the Cell chip used in the PS3. These Cell processors act as a turbocharger for certain portions of the calculations the Roadrunner processes.

I love computer games! I do not play them, have only owned three of them and got tired of them after a few hours play. I prefer the real world. What I love about them is there is such a market for them that they have driven the computer graphics hardware to a wonderfully advanced state and now, they are driving Physics Computing to that same state. It is a fun time to be alive!!!