IBM Roadrunner
Roadrunner is the unofficial name of a supercomputer based on an IBM BladeCenter QS22 cluster that is installed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the U.S. state of New Mexico. With a capacity of 1.026 Peta - FLOPS of Roadrunner presented on 9 June 2008 to a new record and was No. 1 on the TOP500 list. Since then, the system was brought to the final stage of 296 racks and kept with now 1,105 Peta - FLOPS the first place to the list, 2009, in which he was overtaken by the Jaguar system. According to the schedule the start of the daily activities for October 2009. Overall, the system cost around $ 133 million.
IBM built the supercomputer for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE ). He has a hybrid design, consisting of 6480 AMD Opteron processors ( 3240 IBM LS21 blade servers, each containing two dual-core Opterons, interconnected by HyperTransport ). However Roadrunner is not a merger of a cell cluster and an Opteron cluster, but an Opteron cluster where each Opteron core a Cell processor is assumed ( connected by PCI Express), which assumes the mathematical calculations for him, resulting in a number of 12,960 cell processors.
The majority of the computing power comes therefore also of the cell processors: 1.3 petaflops peak vs. 47 TFLOPS peak of the Opterons. The processor architecture is used for the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE), which is co-developed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM (STI ) and is also used in Sony's PlayStation 3 game console. In Roadrunner however comes a new version called Cell PowerXCell 8i used, which is capable of two double-precision calculations in its 128 -bit registers at a top speed of just over 100 GFLOPS to compute (compared to the Playstation -3 variant has only 15 GFLOPS in double precision ).
The Roadrunner uses the operating system Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora. The Cell processors will be delivered as IBM Cell blades and connected by InfiniBand directly with the x3755 Opteron nodes. The system was put into operation on 8 June 2008. The U.S. Department of Energy has the Roadrunner for simulations with respect to the aging of radioactive substances used, including in nuclear weapons (see Advanced Simulation and Computing Program). There were simulated and checked whether the aging nuclear arsenal of the United States is safe and reliable nuclear weapons tests. Other areas of application include computer simulations and calculations for science, finance, economy, and for the automotive industry and the aerospace industry.
The system went live on March 31, 2013 finally decommissioned.