IBM’s Roadrunner supercomputer, built using the Cell chips that power the Sony Playstation 3, has smashed its way into the supercomputing record books. <\/p>\n
The Roadrunner, which combines 12 960 of the Cell chips with 6 948 standard dual-core AMD Opteron chips and 80 terabytes of memory, is the first supercomputer to top 1 quadrillion calculations a second, or the equivalent of one petaflop. <\/p>\n
The new speed record makes the Roadrunner, which runs Red Hat Linux, more than twice as fast as the previous record holder, IBM’s Blue Gene supercomputer. <\/p>\n
The supercomputer will be installed at a US government laboratory later this year. When it’s not busy monitoring the nuclear stockpile, Roadrunner will also be used for research into astronomy, genomics and climate change. <\/p>\n
IBM’s Blue Gene, the previous record holder, runs at a relatively leisurely pace of just 478.2 teraflops using 212 992 processors, significantly more than Roadrunner’s 20 000 processors. <\/p>\n
The success of the Roadrunner is built on combining the Cell chips from the Playstation with the standard PC processors. IBM modified the Cell chips to allow them to carry more bandwidth. <\/p>\n
The standard processors are used to perform the computation needed while the Cell chips crunch the raw data. <\/p>\n