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 I suspect the Top500 people may be a little peeved if their list is out of date on its day of release…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.