IBM has announced that it is building the world’s
fastest supercomputer – using a microprocessor designed for
videogames and relying on the Linux operating system.
Deployed at the Los Alamos lab of the US Department of Energy’s
National Nuclear Security Administration, the machine – codenamed
Roadrunner – is designed to smash the performance barrier of 1,000
trillion calculations per second (one petaflop).
Roadrunner will harness IBM’s new Cell Broadband Engine chip –
originally built for the upcoming Sony PlayStation 3.
The revolutionary supercomputer will be capable of a peak
performance of over 1.6 petaflops (or 1.6 thousand trillion
calculations per second).
The Cell Broadband Engine chips will work in conjunction with
systems based on x86 processors from AMD.
Designed specifically to handle a broad spectrum of scientific
and commercial applications, the supercomputer design includes
sophisticated software to orchestrate over 16,000 AMD Opteron
processor cores and over 16,000 Cell Broadband Engine
processors.
The machine, based on the Linux operating system, will use IBM
System x 3755 servers based on AMD Opteron chips and IBM
BladeCenter H systems equipped with Cell chips.
Designed with space and power consumption issues in mind, the
system will employ advanced cooling and power management
technologies, and will occupy only 12,000 square feet of floor
space, or approximately the size of three basketball courts.
Typical compute processes, file IO, and communication activity
will be handled by AMD Opteron processors, while more complex and
repetitive elements – ones that traditionally consume the majority
of supercomputer resources – will be directed to the 16,000 Cell
processors.
Designed originally for gaming platforms, where intense graphics
and real-time responsiveness are key, IBM said the Cell processors
were ideal to speed Roadrunner through intense mathematical
problems.
IBM will start building the supercomputer later this year, with
completion expected in 2008.
The Cell processor was jointly developed by IBM, Sony and
Toshiba.
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