News Article
The latest IBM flop
This flop is a petaflop, a thousand trillion calculations per second. This was achieved by using components designed for the Playstation 3
A supercomputer codenamed ‘Roadrunner’ has performed calculations at petaflop speed, an equivalent of a quadrillion calculations per second. The precvious benchmark for the world’s fastest computer has been just half as fast as this, also an IBM computer.
The computer is designed for a performance level of 1.6 petaflops peak which it reached recently and is the first Top 500 Linpack sustained 1.0 petaflops system. It uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the operating system. Among its many components the systems uses 6.480 dual core Opterons with 51.8 TB RAM. The machine covers aproximately 12,000 square feet (1,100 square metres) and the components are housed in288 refridgerator sized cases all connected by approximately 57 miles (92 km) of fibre optic cable.
The machine will be installed at a US government lab in New Mexico later this year where it is going to monitor the US nuclear arsenal. It will monitor how the weapons age and whether the material is safe and reliable. Further uses will be astronomy, genomics, climate changes, aerospace industries and financial matters.
John Morrison, leader of the high performance computing division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, said: “Roadrunner will enable us to tackle problems we couldn’t tackle before, we’ll be able to run a different level of problems. We’ll beable to do calculations that we wouldn’t be even consider before.”
The current fastest computer is IBM’ Blue Gene/L was recently upgraded to run at the speed of 478.2 teraflops using 212,992 processors. Roadrunner in comparison uses less tha 20,000 processors due to a hybrid design comprising ‘conventional’ processors and the ‘cell’ chip designed for the Playstation 3.
Sun and Cray also unveiled plans for petaflop computers soon.
The computer is designed for a performance level of 1.6 petaflops peak which it reached recently and is the first Top 500 Linpack sustained 1.0 petaflops system. It uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the operating system. Among its many components the systems uses 6.480 dual core Opterons with 51.8 TB RAM. The machine covers aproximately 12,000 square feet (1,100 square metres) and the components are housed in288 refridgerator sized cases all connected by approximately 57 miles (92 km) of fibre optic cable.
The machine will be installed at a US government lab in New Mexico later this year where it is going to monitor the US nuclear arsenal. It will monitor how the weapons age and whether the material is safe and reliable. Further uses will be astronomy, genomics, climate changes, aerospace industries and financial matters.
John Morrison, leader of the high performance computing division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, said: “Roadrunner will enable us to tackle problems we couldn’t tackle before, we’ll be able to run a different level of problems. We’ll beable to do calculations that we wouldn’t be even consider before.”
The current fastest computer is IBM’ Blue Gene/L was recently upgraded to run at the speed of 478.2 teraflops using 212,992 processors. Roadrunner in comparison uses less tha 20,000 processors due to a hybrid design comprising ‘conventional’ processors and the ‘cell’ chip designed for the Playstation 3.
Sun and Cray also unveiled plans for petaflop computers soon.
