IBM Roadrunner remains fastest supercomputer
San Francisco Business Times
IBM’s Roadrunner supercomputer was ranked the world’s fastest in the latest Top500 Supercomputer Sites list.
The system at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico stole the top spot on the previous list in June from the IBM Blue Gene/L system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The Livermore system had held the No. 1 spot since November 2004.
Roadrunner was the first high-performance computing system to exceed a performance of 1 petaflop (or 1 quadrillion operations per second). It is listed at a speed of 1.105 petaflops on the newest list.
Roadrunner only narrowly held the lead, however, over a Cray (NASDAQ: CRAY) XT5 supercomputer, called Jaguar, which is housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. That system, only the second to break the petaflop barrier, was listed at 1.059 petaflops.
Roadrunner is the result of more than six years of work by Los Alamos researchers and IBM (NYSE: IBM). Its novel "hybrid" architecture uses a chip that was developed for the Sony PlayStation 3.
Fremont-based Panasas Inc. provided the storage for the system.
At No. 3 on the new list is a system called Pleiades, installed at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field. It clocked in at 487 teraflops (trillion operations per second).
Livermore lab’s IBM BlueGene/L system came in at No. 4 with a performance of 478.2 teraflops.
At No. 7 is Franklin, the second new Cray XT5 system. It is installed at the DOE’s NERSC Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in Berkeley, with a listed speed of 266.3 teraflops.
The United States dominates the November list with 291 of the 500 systems, up from 257.
Japan, with 18 systems, China with 16 and India with eight dominate in Asia.
In Europe, the U.K. has the most, with 45 systems. Germany is No. 2 with 24 systems (down from 46 six months ago).
The Roadrunner will be used primarily for nuclear weapons research. But its speed is an important milestone in high-performance computing, which is now used for aircraft design, oil exploration, financial forecasting, biotechnology, and other applications.
The Top500 list is compiled by Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany, and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
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