PS3 Cell Processor Based Supercomputer for Los Alamos ~ "Roadrunner" to be a PetaFlop machine

IBM Eye ^ | Thu 7 Sep 2006 | Greg

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

This news came out a week ago (edit: IBM’s press release came out this afternoon) but I didn’t have anything to add so I didn’t post it. I decided this morning that it was interesting and ought to get a mention just for the news.

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Specifically, a supercomputing machine—dubbed “Roadrunner” and set to be fully installed by 2008 at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory—will run on some 16,000 Cell Broadband Engine processors and a similar number of AMD Opteron processors. The Cell chip was originally built for Sony’s Playstation 3 console, which has been delayed until November for some markets and until 2007 in others.

IBM and AMD officials said in a press release that the new supercomputer will be capable of a peak performance of more than 1.6 petaflops, or 1.6 quadrillion floating calculations per second. That’s 1600 times faster than the 100 teraflops, or 100 trillion calculations per second, that the average human brain processes. It’s even almost six times faster than the 280-teraflop capability of the world’s fastest computer, IBM’s Blue Gene L

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This news is significant for a few reasons. One it speaks to the importance of the work IBM has done with chips for non-traditional uses. By being willing to broaden their horizons, or lose focus, depending on what business school trend is hot, IBM has been able to enhance a core competency.

A second reason this is significant to me is that it demonstrates how IBM can take advantage of advances in one area of its business and monetize it in another. I know of no other company that does as good of a job with monetizing research and patents, and that experience worked to IBM’s advantage here as well.

The third reason I find these sorts of announcements worthwhile, is that it cements IBM in the public mind as being uniquely competent in certain areas of computing. Per a past article in red herring, “Rivals said speed didn’t make IBM’s a better system. ‘We’re much more powerful than IBM’s biggest box,’ Brian Cox, director of worldwide server marketing for HP, told Red Herring”. The guy’s grasping here. If you want someone that really understands fast computing, IBM is who you’d turn to. If you wanted a mid-range PC with Windows XP Media Center edition, you talk to HP. This is an example of why IBM is still relevant in areas other than services and software.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

So the Games chip is now going to something very useful in our National Labs.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

fyi

[ConservativeMind]

This is a good pairing, with IBM intimately aware of both processors due to partnership agreements.

What I like to see is that the symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) capabilities are all on very powerful processors in their own right.

This is technically not a "massively parallel" computer because the processors are not made with parallelism-based architecture. The difference amounts to the granularity of the processes and the ability of each processor to natively support parallel assembler constructs.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Would be fun to study and use this machine....lots of work to be done to get performance....