With the June 9 announce­ment that the IBM super­com­puter “Road­Run­ner” is the first sys­tem to reach the 1 petaflop/s level, the HPC com­mu­nity is enter­ing a realm of unprece­dented com­put­ing power.

Road­run­ner super­com­puter, built by IBM with fund­ing from the National Nuclear Secu­rity Admin­is­tra­tion (NNSA) for Los Alamos National Lab­o­ra­tory, achieved a long-sought super­com­put­ing goal: per­form­ing more than a thou­sand tril­lion oper­a­tions per sec­ond, or petaflop/s. Road­run­ner is the first super­com­puter to use a hybrid proces­sor archi­tec­ture, which is based on 6,912 dual-core Opteron X64 proces­sors from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and 12,960 IBM Cell Broad­band Engine™ (Cell BE) pro­cess­ing ele­ments. The Road­run­ner sys­tem has 98 ter­abytes of mem­ory, and is housed in 278 refrigerator-sized, IBM Blade­Cen­ter® racks occu­py­ing 5,200 square feet. Its 10,000 con­nec­tions – both Infini­band and Giga­bit Eth­er­net — require 55 miles of fiber optic cable. Road­run­ner weighs 500,000 lbs. At the end of May, the sys­tem posted a peak per­for­mance of 1.026 petaflop/s run­ning the Lin­pack bench­mark. This test con­sisted of solv­ing lin­ear equa­tions involv­ing more than 2 mil­lion equa­tions and an equal num­ber of unknowns. Road­run­ner is also rated as very energy (performance/watt) effi­cient (green).

For me, break­ing the petaflop/s bar­rier is the equiv­a­lent of a run­ner finally run­ning the 100-meter race in 9.5 sec­onds — a level of per­for­mance every­one hopes for but proves elu­sive to actu­ally achieve. This will be the third time at ISC that we will have a pre­sen­ta­tion about the almost mag­i­cal sur­pass­ing of a thousand-fold increase in HPC per­for­mance. Twenty-two years ago, in 1986, the leg­endary Cray 2 passed the 1 gigaflop/s level, and in June of that year we held the first ISC. Eleven years later, when the Intel ASCI Red sys­tem landed atop the 9^th TOP500 list pre­sented at the con­fer­ence, this was the first time a sys­tem reached the teraflop/s level. And now Road­Run­ner has cracked the next mag­i­cal bar­rier and will be num­ber one on the 31^st edi­tion of the TOP500 list.

said Prof. Hans Meuer, gen­eral chair of ISC and founder of the TOP500 list.

11th June, 2008