The US Department of Energy yesterday unveiled the IBM Roadrunner, the world’s fastest computer. The computer, which is designed to conduct virtual tests for nuclear weapons, is able to carry out 1,000 trillion (or 1 quadrillion) calculations in one second.
The machine cost $100 million to build and works at twice the speed of Blue Gene, which is now the world’s second fastest computer.
“Roadrunner will not only play a key role in maintaining the U.S. nuclear deterrent, it will also contribute to solving our global energy challenges, and open new windows of knowledge in the basic scientific research fields,” said Samuel Bodman, the US secretary of energy.
The $133 million Roadrunner is designed for a performance level of 1.026 petaflops peak, which it reached in June 2008, and to be the world’s first TOP500 Linpack sustained 1.0 petaflops system.
IBM built the computer for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).[3][4] It is a hybrid design with almost 6,912 AMD Opteron dual core processors and almost 12,960 IBM PowerXCell[5] 8i CPUs in special designed TriBlades connected by Infiniband.
The Roadrunner uses the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system and is managed with xCAT distributed computing software. The world’s most powerful computer, Roadrunner covers approximately 12,000 square feet (1,100 m²). It became operational in 2008.
DOE plans to use the computer for simulating how nuclear materials age and whether the aging nuclear weapon arsenal of the United States is safe and reliable. Other uses for the supercomputer include the sciences, financial, automotive and aerospace industries.
Roadrunner, which was produced by the US Government in collaboration with IBM, is located at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
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