News
IBM Computer Achieves Petaflop Performance
- By Joab Jackson, William Jackson
- June 9, 2008
A National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) supercomputer has achieved
an operational rate of 1,000 trillion calculations per second, or 1 petaflop,
making the Roadrunner -- which the NNSA commissioned IBM Corp. to build in 2006
for around $130 million -- the world's fastest computer, the agency announced
today.
The execution rate is more than double the speed of the top computers on the
biannual Top 500 list of
the world's fastest computers.
"It's a speed demon," said NNSA Administrator Thomas D'Agostino. "Speed is
important here. We have stopped underground nuclear testing" and the new supercomputer
will be used primarily to run simulations of nuclear reactions at the subatomic
level to help ensure the safety of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile.
In addition to being fast, the Roadrunner is also energy-efficient. It operates
at five times the speed of many other supercomputers while using only one-half
the energy, according to Dave Turek, vice president of deep computing at IBM.
Before recent developments in architecture, programming and processor design,
the energy requirements for operating and cooling such a computer would have
been "beyond the pale" for Los Alamos, he said.
The system is housed in an IBM facility in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in 288 refrigerator-sized
IBM BladeCenter racks occupying 6,000 square feet, the company said. It expects
to ship the supercomputer to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in July.
The computer will be used primarily to simulate the decay of nuclear materials,
but it will also assist with research in astronomy, energy, human genome science
and climate change.
It is one of the first computers to deploy large numbers of Cell Broadband
Engine processors, designed in a collaborative effort by Sony, Toshiba and IBM
for the Sony PlayStation video game console. Turek said the Cell processors
used in Roadrunner are a souped-up version of those used in the gaming console,
with five to six times the performance but little increase in power consumption.
The supercomputer runs 12,960 Cell processors on IBM BladeCenter QS22 blade
servers and 6,948 dual-core Opteron chips from Advanced Micro Devices on IBM
LS21 blade servers.
Roadrunner first broke the barrier of sustained petaflop performance on May
25 in a two-hour benchmark calculation. Last weekend, it again achieved sustained
petaflop performance while running an Energy Department application, said Michael
Anastasio, the Los Alamos lab's director.
"With the exception of two other IBM machines, there are no other machines
on the planet that have shown the ability to run a real application at anything
over 100 teraflops," or one-tenth of a petaflop, Turek said.
During its first six months at Los Alamos, Roadrunner will be given a performance
test with unclassified applications, including simulations of HIV, cellulosic
biofuel production, and studies of dark matter and dark energy in the universe.
After that, it will be used primarily for classified NNSA work, although some
capacity will be made available to outside research and academic institutions.
The NNSA has already ordered an additional one-fourth increase in capacity
for classified work.