IBM 1.02 petaflops Roadrunner is now officially the world’s most powerful supercomputer
One thing is for sure — no one can beat IBM, at least when it comes to supercomputers. The big Blue recently unveiled a new supercomputer, designed for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Los Alamos National Lab, that breaks the petaflop barrier. Its high number crunching capability (1,000-trillion operations per second) makes it the world’s most powerful computer. The Roadrunner churns out a sustained performance of 1.02 petaflops – more than three times faster than the nearest non-IBM system.
The Roadrunner is powered by 12,240 IBM PowerXCell 8i Cell Broadband Engine processors. Also under the hood are 6,562 AMD Opteron Dual-Core processors that perform basic compute functions, freeing the PowerXCell 8i chips for the math-intensive calculations that are their specialty.
Two PowerXCell 8i-based blade servers (IBM BladeCenter QS22) and one AMD-based blade (IBM BladeCenter LS21) are integrated into a specialized “tri-blade” configuration. The machine is composed of a total of 3,456 tri-blade units, each of which can run at 400 billion operations per second (400 gigaflops).
Its 10,000 connections—both InfiniBand and Gigabit Ethernet—require 57 miles of fiber optic cable. The system has 80 terabytes of memory, weighs 500,000 pounds, and is housed in 288 refrigerator-sized, IBM BladeCenter racks occupying 6,000 square feet.
[Product Page]
