According to IBM, the Roadrunner will be capable of performing more than a quadrillion operations, or a petaflop, when it’s fully operational. It will be designed to allow the system to segment complex mathematical equations and route each of these segments for efficient handling. Computing processes such as file input and output (IO), and communication activity will be handled by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Opteron processors while complex and repetitive elements that traditionally consume the majority of supercomputer resources will be handled by 16,000 Cell BE processors.
IBM claims that the Roadrunner will be twice as powerful as its Blue Gene supercomputer located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory which is capable of 478.2 teraflops a second. This Blue Gene is currently the world’s fastest supercomputer according to a list of top supercomputers released by SC07, an international conference for high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis held at Reno, Nevada. In June, the Livermore machine was upgraded to a speed rating of 478 trillion mathematical operations per second from 280 teraflops with an increase in number of processors from 130,072 to 212,992. The second fastest machine is also a Blue Gene located at the Forschungszentrum Juelich in Germany. It is powered by 65,536 processors.
Hewlett-Packard’s supercomputer located at Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a subsidiary of the Tata conglomerate in India, is ranked in fourth place according to SC07’s list. The HP’s cluster platform 3000 BL460c system at CRL has performance of 117.9 teraflops.
Earlier, supercomputers were built on large-scale monolithic designs that were not capable of distributing computing activities while now the supercomputers are assembled through a group of smaller servers woven together with the help of high-speed links.
Source: ComputerWire daily updates
