November 13, 2007

IBM ‘Roadrunner’ will offer petaflop computing

Written by Jan Harris

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IBM 'Roadrunner' will offer petaflop computing
IBM’s Blue Gene/L supercomputer heads the Top500 Supercomputer Sites list, and the company is developing a computer that is twice as powerful as Blue Gene/L - the ‘Roadrunner’.

The Top500 Supercomputer Sites list was released at the SC07 conference in Reno, US. It uses the Linpack measurement to assess a computer’s performance. This requires each system having to solve a dense system of linear equations.

IBM’s Blue Gene/L supercomputer can perform 478.2 trillion operations, or 478.2 teraflops per second, while the Roadrunner will be able to perform over quadrillion operations per second, or a petaflop, when it’s fully operational.

Roadrunner is scheduled to be delivered to the US Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory next summer.

IBM’s Blue Gene/L has retained its position at the top of the ranking since six months ago, when it topped the list with a performance of 280.6 teraflops per second. On the latest results a supercomputer with this performance would have ranked at number 255 in the list.

Blue Gene/L’s performance over the six months has been enhanced through an upgrade to the ‘cluster’, a process whereby supercomputers are assembled by weaving together racks of smaller servers through thousands of high-speed links, rather than being one indivisible whole.

IBM’s superfast Roadrunner will combine Cell processors which are used in the PlayStation 3, and processors from Advanced Micro Devices.

Filed Under Technology