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WASHINGTON - A computer designed to run virtual tests of US nuclear weapons will be the world's fastest, making a quadrillion calculations per second, the US Department of Energy said.
The IBM Roadrunner supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is the first to achieve a what is known as a petaflop of sustained performance, the department and IBM said.
'Flop' is an acronym meaning floating-point operations per second. One petaflop is 1,000 trillion computer calculations per second.
"Roadrunner will be used by the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration to perform calculations that vastly improve the ability to certify that the US nuclear weapons stockpile is reliable without conducting underground nuclear tests," the department said in a statement.
"Roadrunner will not only play a key role in maintaining the US nuclear deterrent, it will also contribute to solving our global energy challenges, and open new windows of knowledge in the basic scientific research fields," it added.
"To put this into perspective, if each of the 6 billion people on earth had a hand calculator and worked together on a calculation 24 hours per day, 365 days a year, it would take 46 years to do what Roadrunner would do in one day," the department said.
Roadrunner facts and figures
- Roadrunner was primarily installed to look after America's nukes, but will also be used for research into astronomy, energy, human genome science and climate change.
- Roadrunner is the world's first hybrid supercomputer. In a first-of-a-kind design, the Cell Broadband Engine - originally designed for video game platforms such as the Sony PlayStation 3 - will work in conjunction with x86 processors from AMD.
- In total, Roadrunner connects 6,948 dual-core AMD Opteron chips (on IBM Model LS21 blade servers) as well as 12,960 Cell engines (on IBM Model QS22 blade servers).
- It has 80 terabytes of memory and is housed in 288 refrigerator-sized, IBM BladeCenter racks occupying 557 square metres. Its 10,000 connections both Infiniband and Gigabit Ethernet - require 91 kilometres of fibre optic cable. Roadrunner weighs 226,796 kilos.
- Roadrunner runs on open-source Linux software from Red Hat.
- Custom Configuration. Two IBM QS22 blade servers and one IBM LS21 blade server are combined into a specialised "tri-blade" configuration for Roadrunner. It is composed of a total of 3,456 tri-blades. Each tri-blade can run at 400 G/flops.
- Rather that traditional supercomputer power consumption, IBM's claims that its hybrid format uses 3.9 megawatts, delivering 376 million calculations per watt. IBM also expects Roadrunner to be at the top end of the Green 500 list of supercomputers, which will be released at Dresden's supercomputing conference this month.
- REUTERS / NZ HERALD STAFF
