Roadrunner: 130,536 cores break the Petaflop barrier ( the world’s first hybrid supercomputer)

TgDaily ^ | Monday, June 09, 2008 12:13 | Wolfgang Gruener

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Armonk (NY) – IBM is prepared to deliver the Roadrunner supercomputer to the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The system was development over the past 18 months and is not only the first hybrid supercomputer using Cell processors, but also the first commercial system to exceed a performance of 1 PFlops.

Roadrunner is the NNSA’s third IBM-built supercomputer, adding to two IBM-built supercomputers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: BlueGene/L, completed in 2005, has 131,072 p5 processors and delivers a sustained performance of 280.6 TFlops. The 12,208 processor ASC Purple is estimated to provide a sustained performance of 75.8 teraflops.

The new Roadrunner, which is currently disassembled and will be shipped to the NNSA within 30 days, according to IBM, was originally described to deliver about 2.8x (3.5x peak: 1.6 TFlops ) the combined processing power of BlueGene/L and ASC Purple. Back in 2006, IBM said that the system would bet more than 16,000 Opteron processor cores and more than 16,000 Cell BE CPUs to deliver on the Petaflop goal.

The final system ended up with less processors – 13,896 Opteron cores (6948 dual-core processors) as well as 12,960 Cell BE chips with a total of 116,640 PPE and SPE cores for a combined 130,536 cores. The original design called for about 176,000 cores.   

According to IBM, Roadrunner has the floating point performance of about 100,000 notebooks. To describe the horsepower of the system, IBM said that Roadrunner can do in one day what would take the entire population of the world 46 years on handheld calculators, assuming a pace of one second per calculation.

Other interesting facts of the supercomputer, which IBM said cost about $100 million, include a power consumption of about 3.9 Mwatts, as well as a structure that includes 80 TB of memory, 576 miles of fiber optic cable as well as 3456 tri-blades which can deliver 400 GFlops each.

Also noteworthy is that Roadrunner was supposed to become the flagship product of AMD’s Torrenza platform, a project which was pitched as an open AMD x86 platform that takes advantage of Direct Connect Architecture and the Hypertransport interface. However, we haven’t heard much about Torrenza anymore and we don’t expect AMD to make a big deal of it.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Old Bit twiddlers might find this of interest...from Gamespot:

The Cell Project at IBM Research, details inside.

[ShadowAce]

I can't tell if they're talking about processor saturation or network saturation.

Either way, I have no idea. :)

[MD_Willington_1976]

and the super computer market, latest one from IBM has a whack of Opterons and Cells...

http://forums.amd.com/forum/index.cfm?forumid=1

Drop on by the forums...

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

May be n Numerical Analysis term....found this:

A Theoretical Introduction to Numerical Analysis (Hardcover)

***********************EXCERPT*****************

presents the general methodology and principles of numerical analysis, illustrating the key concepts using numerical methods from real analysis, linear algebra, and differential equations.

***************************

Explains the most fundamental and universal concepts, including error, efficiency, complexity, stability, and convergence. Addresses advance topics, such as intrinsic accuracy limits, saturation of numerical methods by smoothness, and......

Never studied this area of Math,...stayed with Foundations...like Topology...

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Thanks...I have some AMD’s/...

[Psycho_Bunny]

Wow....they probably need 350,000 watts just to power the CPUs.

[InterceptPoint]

According to IBM, Roadrunner has the floating point performance of about 100,000 notebooks.

Now the question is: Will Steve Jobs ever build a machine as powerful as this and sell it for $2500?

Per Moore's Law, the answer is probably not but possibly.

Moore's Law tells us that processing power doubles every 18 months. That's a lot of "times twos" to get to 100,000. In fact it takes about 16 or 17 of them so Jobs would still have to be on the job 25 years from now in 2033. That's not likely but possible.

I can't wait. It will probably be running OS XX

[Straight Vermonter]

No idea.

[TiberiusClaudius]

I turned down a job offer about 6 years ago to work on, if not this very project, a sister project in the same group in Poughkeepsie. Oh, well.

[SunkenCiv]

> not only the first hybrid supercomputer using Cell processors, but also the first commercial system to exceed a performance of 1 PFlops

Thanks Ernest.

[texas booster]

Latest update from 300,000 (!) computers and PS3s all folding for science at the Folding@Home project.

All of these systems together slightly beat the Roadrunner system.

Client statistics by OS

OS Type	Current TFLOPS*	Active CPUs	Total CPUs
Windows	189	198529	2043258
Mac OS X/PowerPC	7	8536	116294
Mac OS X/Intel	26	8500	50868
Linux	69	40433	306753
GPU	133	1930	8605
PLAYSTATION®3	1510	53560	535096
Total	1934	311488	3060874

[Drango]

All of these systems together slightly beat the Roadrunner system.

LOL...We b bad.

Proud 2 b foldin'.

http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/team_summary.php?s=&t=36120

[Straight Vermonter]

I’ve noticed that our folding team is slipping a little. I’m sure FR is busier than usual since it is an election year. Maybe we should do another appeal to FReepers to join the team.

[antiRepublicrat]

Our interconnects are about a million times slower than Roadrunner’s, but our power in numbers is huge. I believe F@H is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most powerful distributed computer, and that’s mainly because of the PS3s.

[SunkenCiv]

cell supercomputer site:freerepublic.com

Google

[bmwcyle]

ping