Editor's Desk | Dawn of the petaflop
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The Energy Department's new supercomputer, the Roadrunner, has twice the speed of any other at a peak performance of 1.026 petaflops ' more than 1,000 trillion calculations per second.
It's not surprising that majoradvances in computing performanceno longer garner the awe orattention they once did. Performanceleaps have become such apart of everyday life ' and thescale of computing power andstorage capacity has become soincomprehensible ' that it nolonger seems to matter how fasta computer can run or how manygigabytes of content can fit on adisk drive.Still, it was hard not to marvelat the news last month that anew supercomputer built by IBMfor the Energy Department hadachieved a peak performance of1.026 petaflops ' more than1,000 trillion calculations persecond.The next four fastest supercomputerson the latest biannualcompilation of the world's 500most powerful supercomputersare half the speed of IBM's latestmodel.Those four blazingly fast machinesare being left in theproverbial dust by the new speeddemon nicknamed Roadrunner.Commissioned by the NationalNuclear Security Administrationat a cost of about $130 million,Roadrunner hardly resembles itsnimble-footed namesake.The supercomputer consists of288 refrigerator-sized IBM Blade-Center racks occupying 6,000square feet. This is one of the firstcomputers to deploy large numbersof the Cell Broadband Engineprocessors designed in a collaborativeeffort by Sony, Toshiba andIBM for the Sony PlayStation 3video game console.With little increase in powerconsumption, these souped-upprocessors deliver five to sixtimes the performance of theones found in gaming consoles.Roadrunner divides tasks by assigningstandard processing todual-core chips from AdvanceMicro Devices and processor-intensivemathematical work tothe Cell chips.In years to come, Roadrunnerwill be remembered not only forbreaking the petaflop barrier butalso for overcoming some of thedevilish power and cooling challengesthat accompany computingat this level.Beyond bragging rights, Roadrunnerwill allow scientists to simulatethe decay of nuclear materials.It will also assist with researchinto astronomy, energy, thehuman genome and climatechange.And it will perform that work ata record pace: Ten years ago, thefastest supercomputer in theworld would have needed 20years to finish a problem Roadrunnercan complete in a week.Welcome to the Petaflop Era.
GCN Editor in Chief
Wyatt Kash
GCN
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