IBM's Supercomputer 'Roadrunner' Smashes Performance Record

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Continuing its commitment to provide the world class supercomputers, International Business Machine (IBM), the world’s biggest computer services provider, on Monday unveiled its new supercomputer "Roadrunner."

Operating at 1 petaflop or 1,000 trillion calculations per second, Roadrunner is billed as the fastest supercomputer in the world.

One petaflop is equal to one thousand trillion calculations per second or one million billion calculations per second or one quadrillion calculations per second.

IBM built Roadrunner for the U.S. Department of Energy and will be used by the DoE's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to manage the nation's nuclear weapons.

In a statement, the DoE said that the supercomputer, built by IBM, will perform calculations that vastly improve the ability to certify that the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile is safe and reliable without conducting underground nuclear tests. It will also be used for research into astronomy, energy, human genome science and climate change.

Roadrunner, named after New Mexico's state bird, will be housed at NNSA's Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. IBM engineers and scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory worked together for six years to develop this super machine, which is built using chips from both consumer electronics and more common server processors.

IBM said it created Roadrunner using 12,960 Cell microprocessors similar to the Cell chips used by Sony's PlayStation 3 to generate complex graphics. These Cell processors act as a turbocharger for certain portions of the calculations the Roadrunner, the world's first hybrid supercomputer, processes. In addition, the super machine uses a first-of-a-kind design, the Cell Broadband Engine, and AMD Opteron processors.

In total, Roadrunner contains 6,948 dual-core AMD Opteron chips on IBM Model LS21 blade servers and 12,960 Cell engines on IBM Model QS22 blade servers. The machine has 80 terabytes of memory and is fitted into 288 refrigerator-size IBM BladeCenter racks taking up 6,000 square feet.

Emcore, Flextronics, Mellanox and Voltaire are the other major tech companies that contributed components and technology to the development of Roadrunner.

Priced at nearly $100 million, Roadrunner is twice as fast as the existing No.1 rated Blue Gene system, another government computer built by IBM for nuclear research at California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory which itself is three times faster than any of the world's other supercomputers.

To put the processing power in perspective, while a complex physics calculation takes Roadrunner one day to complete, it would take 6 billion people 46 years to do the same calculations.