A Supercomputer, Roadrunner built specifically to crunch military data has been unveiled by IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory boffins. It is capable of sustaining 1,000 trillion operations per second. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said the new computer will also be used to help solve global energy problems and “open new windows of knowledge” in basic research.
The Roadrunner is twice as fast as the old BluGene/L champ. The $133 million supercomputer achieved the milestone with the help of 12,960 “improved” Cell processors (like those powering your PS3) and a smaller number of AMD Opteron processors — 116,640 processor cores in total. The supercomputer is based on advanced parallel computing technologies. It takes up 6,000 square feet, weighs 500,000 pounds total, uses 57 miles of cable and requires 3.9 megawatts of power. The lessons that computer scientists learn by making it calculate even faster are seen as essential to the future of both personal and mobile consumer computing.
To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D’Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.
Petaflop machines like Roadrunner have the potential to fundamentally alter science and engineering, supercomputer experts say. Researchers can ask questions and receive answers virtually interactively and can perform experiments that would previously have been impractical.
Current supercomputers measure performance in teraflops, and IBM along with Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Cray and Silicon Graphics are all competing to be the first to bust through to the petaflop, one thousand trillion calculations per second.
Source: The New York Times
Filed under
Hardware,
Supercomputer | Tags:
Cray,
IBM,
Parallel Computing,
Petaflop,
Roadrunner,
Supercomputer,
Teraflop | Comment Below
Related?
IBM Roadrunner is Judged Fastest Computer at Supercomputer ConferenceJune 24th, 2009 The 2009 International Supercomputing Conference ranked IBM Roadrunner as the fastest supercomputer followed by Cray's Jaguar. The IBM supercomputer accounts 1.105 petaflops.
Dow Zones Recovered Significantly with Tech Stocks UpOctober 13th, 2008 Dow Zones soared on Monday with Apple, Microsoft, Dell, and other tech companies gained double digit. Dow went up 936.42 points to close at 9,9387.61 after losses of 8 consecutive days.
IBM's Websphere Ranked Top in the latest SurveyOctober 20th, 2008 AS per the recent survey conducted by Evans Data survey, IBM's Websphere replaced BEA Weblogic as the top ranking Application Server. Oracle acquired Weblogic in April this year.
HP to Acquire Colubris Network to Enhance Wireless TechnologyAugust 12th, 2008 HP ProCurve announced that it had made an agreement to buy Colubris Network. Colubris delivers wireless integrated access, management and security products as well as 802.11n capability for enterprises and service providers.
Review of IBM's New Collaborative Platform JazzJune 1st, 2008 Overview:
Jazz is an IBM Rational project to build a scalable, extensible team collaboration platform for integrating work across the phases of the development lifecycle. It's based on the client-server technology and manages the source management, build tools and promotes the team collaboration.
A Close Look at FathomDB, Database as a Service for Cloud ComputingMarch 2nd, 2009 FathomDB unveiled on Friday private beta version of its relational database as a service platform for the cloud computing. The service is currently available for mySQL database hosted on Amazon's EC2 Web Service.
A Close Look at Widget Service Provider, WidgetboxJune 20th, 2009 If you have your own blog and would like to add something cool to the sidebar, you can take a look Widgetbox. It is also a great place if you use a personalized start page or want to jazz up your profile at your favorite social networking website.
Oracle to Buy BEA SystemsJanuary 17th, 2008 Oracle came to an agreement to buy BEA systems for $8.5 billion. The middleware vendor declined the offer of $6.5 billion three months back.
