The Roadrunner, World’s Fastest Computer
June 11th, 2008 | by timm |
While this isn’t directly related to web design currently, it will affect us down the road with the technology advances it brings. It’s an interesting article. Here are some highlights. If you’d like to read the full article, you can check it out here.
“Scientists unveiled the world’s fastest supercomputer on Monday, a $100 million machine that for the first time has performed 1,000 trillion calculations per second in a sustained exercise. The technology breakthrough was accomplished by engineers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and IBM Corp. on a computer to be used primarily on nuclear weapons work, including simulating nuclear explosions.The computer, named Roadrunner, is twice as fast as IBM’s Blue Gene system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which itself is three times faster than any of the world’s other supercomputers, according to IBM.
To put the computer’s speed in perspective, it has roughly the computing power of 100,000 of today’s most powerful laptops stacked 1.5 miles high, according to IBM. Or, if each of the world’s 6 billion people worked on hand-held computers for 24 hours a day, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner computer can do in a single day.
The IBM and Los Alamos engineers worked six years on the computer technology.
The interconnecting system occupies 6,000 square feet with 57 miles of fiber optics and weighs 500,000 pounds. Although made from commercial parts, the computer consists of 6,948 dual-core computer chips and 12,960 cell engines, and it has 80 terabytes of memory housed in 288 connected refrigerator-sized racks.
The cost: $100 million.
Turek said the computer in a two-hour test on May 25 achieved a “petaflop” speed of sustained performance, something no other computer had ever done. It did so again in several real applications involving classified nuclear weapons work this past weekend.
“This is a huge and remarkable achievement,” said Turek in a conference call with reporters.
A “flop” is an acronym meaning floating-point-operations per second. One petaflop is 1,000 trillion operations per second. Only two years ago, there were no actual applications where a computer achieved 100 teraflops — a tenth of Roadrunner’s speed — said Turek, noting that the tenfold advancement came over a relatively short time.
The Roadrunner computer, now housed at the IBM research laboratory in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., will be moved next month to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
But the computer — and more so the technology that it represents — marks a future for a wide range of other research and uses. “The technology will be pronounced in its employment across industry in the years to come,” predicted Turek, the IBM executive.”
