Meet the Roadrunner SuperComputer: Twice as Fast as Big Blue
The Roadrunner is currently the world’s fastest supercomputer, a $100 million machine that sustained a processing speed of 1 Peta flop during a 2 hour test on May 25th.
This breakthrough took engineers at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and IBM Corp 6 years to complete. Roadrunner is twice as fast as IBM’s Blue Gene and is intended for simulating nuclear weapon detonations as well as for other applications in engineering, medicine and science.
David Turek, vice president of IBM’s supercomputing programs was quoted saying that some elements of Roadrunner can be traced to popular video games, and in some senses Roadrunner is a souped up Playstation 3.
Roadrunner now resides at the IBM Research Laboratory in Poughkeepsie, New York and will be moved next month to LANL in New Mexico. The massive computer occupies 6000 square feet, with 57 miles of fiber optics and weighs 500,000 pounds. It is made entirely from commercial parts, consisting of 6,948 dual-core processors and 12,960 cell engines. It has 80 Terabytes of storage.
[ VIA CNN ]
