Two Lab computer systems in top 10 of TOP500 listing

November 21, 2011—The TOP500 project was started in 1993 to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing. Twice a year, a list of the 500 most powerful computer systems is announced.

Once again, two systems at LANL are in the top 10—Roadrunner ranked #10 and Cielo ranked #6—positions that are unchanged from the last listing in July. Ranked #1 is the "K" computer at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe, Japan.

The TOP500 list is compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany; Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Roadrunner
Rank: 10

• System Family—IBM BladeCenter
• System Architecture—BladeCenter QS22/LS21 Cluster, PowerXCell 8i 3.2 Ghz/Opteron DC 1.8 GHz, Voltaire Infiniband
• Installed in 2009
• Sustained Performance: 1.04 Petaflop/s
  

Roadrunner is the first computer cluster system to break the Petaflop/s barrier and was the #1 supercomputer in the world for 18 months in 2009 and 2010.

Each compute node in this cluster consists of two AMD Opteron™ dual-core processors plus four PowerXCell 8i™ processors used as computational accelerators. The accelerators used in Roadrunner are a special IBM-developed variant of the Cell processor used in the Sony PlayStation 3®.

Roadrunner is used to perform advanced physics and predictive simulations in a classified mode to assure the safety, security, and effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear deterrent. Models and simulations could include hydrodynamic mixing and turbulence of exotic materials under extreme conditions—temperatures at the core of the sun, time scales in the microseconds, and velocities of millions of miles per hour.

Cielo
Rank: 6

• System Family—Cray XE
• System Architecture—Cray XE6 8-core 2.4 GHz
• Operating System—Linux
• Interconnect—Custom
• Processor—AMD x86_64 Opteron 8 Core 2400 MHz (9.6 GFlops)
• Installed in 2011
• Sustained Performance: 1.11 Petaflop/s.
  

The hardware takes up about 1,500 square feet and uses less than 4 megawatts of energy. The system consists of 96 cabinets with nearly 9,000 compute nodes and approximately 300 terabytes of memory.

Recent upgrades give Cielo a peak performance of 1.35 Petaflop/s.

Cielo is used by scientists at three national laboratories operated for the National Nuclear Security Administration—LANL, Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)—to perform advanced physics and predictive simulations in a classified mode to assure the safety, security, and effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear deterrent.