Roadrunner breaks petaflop barrier
IBM has developed what’s said to be the first supercomputer capable of petaflop processing rates. The machine will be installed in the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US.
Roadrunner is a hybrid supercomputer in which the Cell Broadband Engine will work in conjunction with x86 processors from AMD. In total, Roadrunner connects 6948 dual core AMD Opteron chips housed on IBM Model LS21 blade servers and 12,960 Cell engines housed on IBM Model QS22 blade servers). Two QS22 blade servers and one LS21 blade server are combined into a ‘triblade’ configuration. Mathematically and cpu intensive elements are directed to the Cell processors and each triblade unit can run at 400Gflops.
The system, which has 80Tbyte of memory, is housed in 288 IBM BladeCenter racks and takes up 6000sq ft. Its 10,000 connections – both Infiniband and Gigabit Ethernet – require 57miles of fibre optic cable.
Roadrunner consumes 3.9MW, but performs 376million calculations per Watt.