IBM aiming for one petaflop — wins hybrid supercomputer deal
IBM has won a deal to build a supercomputer at
Los Alamos National Laboratory that will pair more than 16,000 AMD Opteron
processors with more than 16,000 Cell processors to try to reach a new computing
milestone for the company.
IBM has won a deal to build a supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory that will pair more than 16,000 AMD Opteron processors with more than 16,000 Cell processors to try to reach a new computing milestone for the company.
The machine, dubbed Roadrunner, uses a hybrid approach that combines a conventional cluster of Opteron servers with Cell chips that handle some of the calculating grunt work. Each Cell chip, originally designed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba for the Sony PlayStation 3 video game console, includes eight special-purpose engines that can rapidly perform physics calculations.
LANL’s sister lab, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, currently houses the top-ranked machine, IBM’s Blue Gene/L, which can perform 280 trillion calculations per second, or 280 teraflops. Roadrunner is designed to nearly quadruple that to a sustained speed of 1 quadrillion floating-point operations per second, or a petaflop.
Roadrunner, which will run [Red Hat] Linux and include software to juggle tasks between the Opteron and Cell processors, will be built using commercially available IBM hardware. That includes System x3755 servers with four Opteron processors apiece and IBM BladeCenter H servers with Cell-based systems.
The rumor at LANL is there will be a backdoor link to World Of Warfare.
Posted: Thu - September 7, 2006 at 06:26 AM