IBM smashes petaflop performance record

IBM's new Roadrunner supercomputer has smashed the high-tech equivalent of the four- minute mile by breaking the lofty petaflop barrier.

IBM said last week that the hybrid system running AMD Opteron processors and Cell chips sustained a speed of 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second, about twice as fast as the next-fastest supercomputer, IBM's BlueGene/L . Don Grice, chief engineer of the Roadrunner project, said the petaflop barrier was surpassed on May 25, on the fourth attempt.

The US$100 million Roadrunner would take a single week to run a calculation that the fastest supercomputer 10 years ago would have needed 20 years to complete, officials said.

The supercomputer will be shipped in July to the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, which will use it to test nuclear weapons systems, predict long-term climate change and try to develop an HIV vaccine, among other things, said John Morrison, high-performance computing division leader.

"We're dealing with nuclear weapons," said Thomas D'Agostino, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration. "Speed is of critical importance here."

The Linux-based Roadrunner has 6,948 dual-core Opterons on IBM LS21 blades, as well as 12,960 Cell processors on IBM QS22 blades. The machine, which has 80TB of memory, has 296 IBM BladeCenter H racks. It occupies 6,000 square feet, uses 57 miles of fiber-optic cable and weighs 500,000 pounds.

The Cell chips were designed jointly by IBM, Toshiba Corp. and Sony Corp. for the latter's PlayStation 3 game console.