Roadrunner runs away with top supercomputer spot, breaks petaflop barrier

09 June 2008

Now, the world's fastest supercomputer has a new name – Roadrunner. The US Energy Department's Los Alamos Laboratory, in association with IBM, has built this amazing machine that becomes the first to break the petaflop barrier by performing more than one thousand trillion calculations per second.

The supercomputer was developed at the Los Alamos Laboratory and uses Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Opteron chips and the Cell processors found in PlayStation games consoles. According to Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, it will be used to help solve global energy problems and "open new windows of knowledge" in basic research.

"We replace our high-performance supercomputers every four or five years," said Andy White, leader of supercomputer development at Los Alamos. "They become outdated in terms of speed, and the maintenance costs and failure rates get too high."

The $133 million Roadrunner, developed over a period of six years, is composed of off-the-shelf components, including almost 7,000 dual-core Opteron processors and almost 13,000 Cell processors jointly designed by IBM and Sony originally for use PlayStation video-game consoles.

In contrast, the earlier contender for the top supercomputing spot, IBM's Blue Gene/L, uses over 200,000 and runs at half the speed.

White explained that the use of two kinds of chips represents a revolution in supercomputing.