Beep beep, 500 trillion times a second - June 09, 2008
Computing has entered the petaflop age: John Markoff reports in the New York Times that the IBM "Roadrunner" system at Los Alamos has nipped into petaflop territory, clocking up 1.026 quadrillion operations a second. Interestingly for the petaflop buffs, this system doesn't use the same chips as IBM's previous recordholders in the supercomputer stakes
The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an I.B.M. Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony’s PlayStation 3 video-game machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations.The Roadrunner also includes a smaller number of more conventional Opteron processors, made by Advanced Micro Devices, which are already widely used in corporate servers.
“Roadrunner tells us about what will happen in the next decade,” said Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for computer science at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “Technology is coming from the consumer electronics market and the innovation is happening first in terms of cellphones and embedded electronics.”
We had a little story on taking this approach further with millions of low-cost processors in our coverage of climate modelling a few weeks back. Apparently Roadrunner will be warming up with some climate models before it gets down to the real business of simulating the first few shakes of a nuclear explosion. Way to prioritise, guys.
It's not clear from the Markoff article when the milestone was passed: specifically, whether it was too late for the 15 April cut-off for the June release of the Top500 supercomputer list on June 18th. I suspect the Top500 people may be a little peeved if their list is out of date on its day of release...
More discussion and detail in a curtainraiser from Computer World a few weeks ago. Here's the IBM press release for the project's inception. They're making jokes about using Vista on it over at Slashdot. And from my own back pages, here's an old story from Wired on IBM's original Blue Gene petaflop plans.
Comments
In the teleconference that concluded just now, Dave Turek of IBM reported the record was effectively broken on May 25 in their Poughkeepsie, NY, labs. Bad timing for that Top 500 list...
Posted by: Alexandra Witze | June 9, 2008 04:20 PM
Actually, it's 1,000 trillion times a second, unless you're counting the beeps in the headline as one calculation each.
The Laboratory, NNSA and IBM all worked closely with the TOP500 organization to make sure no one is upset by this announcement about the petaflop recpord, set on May 26 -- news too big to keep under wraps until the TOP500 list comes out.
To see a video on Roadrunner produced by Los Alamos National Laboratory go to
http://www.lanl.gov/news/newsbulletin/QuickTimes/Roadrunner.red.mov
online.
Posted by: Kevin Roark | June 9, 2008 05:55 PM
Thanks Kevin.
I'm not an expert -- either on supercomputers or roadrunners -- but it seems to me that one beep per flop should be the rule here. Hence the headline.
Posted by: Oliver | June 9, 2008 06:02 PM
Vista in petaflop iron? Install Linux then emulate a Winblows environment. That will run Vista faster but not better. Vista is the bumble bee version of a flying pig.
Posted by: Uncle Al | June 10, 2008 01:55 AM
It is very unlikely that the Road Runner will do anything more that beep at a very few handcrafted codes. It was easy to build, perhaps too easy, but it is not very useful. IMHO, it is a complete waste of money, and built for all the wrong reasons.
Posted by: Steven Ericsson-Zenith | June 10, 2008 07:47 AM
I would like to read something about the whys's and wherefor's of IBM's design changes between the original Blue Gene and Roadrunner.
Posted by: Harry Wertmuller | June 11, 2008 01:49 AM