HPC Roadrunner

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Roadrunner June 2009nk as Number 1 on Top5

• The 33rd edition of the list of the world’s TOP500 supercomputers was released on June 23, 2009, with the 1.105 petaflop/s Roadrunner system holding on to the top spot it first achieved in June 2008. Five of the top 10 systems on the newest TOP500 list are located at DOE facilities. Eight of the top 10 supercomputers are located in the United States.

Roadrunner background

• Green500 ranks the world's top supercomputers by energy efficiency. On the November 2008 Green500 release, Roadrunner is #7. Roadrunner is cited for "extraordinary energy efficiency... For comparison, the last two supercomputers to top the TOP500 are #43 and #499 on the Green500." (July 1, 2008)
• Roadrunner installation at Los Alamos National Laboratory video (mp4)
• (former) NM US Senator Domenici, press release on Roadrunner, July 31, 2008 (S.R. 637)
• Roadrunner supercomputer puts research at new scale (LANL Roadrunner press release: scientists successfully testing human vision simulation codes, at petascale, on Roadrunner, June 16, 2008)
• ..Fastest in the World (NNSA Roadrunner press release, June 9, 2008)
• Roadrunner supercomputer fastest in world (LANL Roadrunner press release: initial announcement with links to a brief movie, statements by NM US Senator Pete Domenici and US Representative Tom Udall, June 9, 2008)
• Roadrunner Smashes Petaflops Barrier (IBM Roadrunner press release, Armonk, NY, June 9, 2008)
• Roadrunner-Computing in the Fast Lane (1663, Los Alamos Science and Technology Magazine, May 2008)

In a test run on May 27, 2008, the Roadrunner supercomputer, built by IBM with funding from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) for Los Alamos National Laboratory, achieved a long-sought supercomputing goal: performing more than a thousand trillion operations per second, or petaflop/s.

A “flops” is an acronym meaning floating-point operations per second.  One petaflop/s is 1,000 trillion operations per second.  To put this into perspective, if each of the 6 billion people on earth had a hand calculator and worked together on a calculation 24 hours per day, 365 days a year, it would take 46 years to do what Roadrunner would do in one day.

Roadrunner is the first supercomputer to use a hybrid processor architecture, which is based on both Opteron X64 processors from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and the IBM Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell BE) processing elements.

Roadrunner will be housed at NNSA’s Los Alamos National Laboratory. The laboratory worked collaboratively with IBM, the manufacturer, for six years to deliver a novel computer architecture that can meet the nation’s evolving national security needs.  The result has redefined the frontier of supercomputing, not only by crossing the one petaflop threshold, but also by introducing a new paradigm for the future.