Science and Weather‘Roadrunner’ supercomputer declared obsolete, decomissioned
Los Alamos National Laboratory's five-year old supercomputer — Roadrunner — was declared obsolete on March 31st, and will be dismantled later this month.
This $120 million supercomputer was hailed as the fastest computer in the world in 2008 and 2009, but as with all things in technology, faster and more efficient computers quickly displaced it from that lofty position. In its day, though, it succeeded in reaching a top speed of 1.456 petaflops — that's 1,456 trillion 'floating-point operations per second', and it was the first computer to run at sustained petaflops speeds. For comparison, some of the top computer processors for PC computers and laptops today apparently get up to gigaflops speeds, but that's still roughly a hundred thousand to a million times slower than Roadrunner.
[ Related: Los Alamos lab decides to decommission Roadrunner ]
Its speed wasn't the only thing that set Roadrunner apart, though. According to the Los Alamos website:
Roadrunner's design was unique, and controversial. It combined two different kinds of processors, making it a “hybrid.” It had 6,563 dual-core general-purpose processors (AMD Opterons™), with each core linked to a special graphics processor (PowerXCell 8i) called a “Cell.” The Cell was an enhanced version of a specialized processor originally designed for the Sony Playstation 3®, adapted specifically to support scientific computing.
Although other hybrid computers existed, none were at the supercomputing scale. Many doubted that a hybrid supercomputer could work, so for Los Alamos and IBM, Roadrunner was a leap of faith.
Some of Roadrunner's accomplishments:
• It was used to help model how stars explode into supernovae
• It helped scientists explore the 'magnetic reconnection' that is observed in solar flares
• It was used to create the largest HIV evolutionary tree with the hopes that it would help create a vaccine
• It modeled dark matter and dark energy to explore the origins of the unseen universe
[ More Geekquinox: How astronomers find planets around other stars ]
According to an Ars Technica article, Roadrunner still ranks as one of the 22 fastest computers in the world, but its lack of efficiency (compared to more modern computers) is why it's being declared obsolete. The Los Alamos lab has already been using another computer, called Cielo, as its main supercomputer since March 3rd, 2013. Cielo apparently runs at about the same speeds as Roadrunner did, but it takes up less space and consumes less energy, and cost only $54 million — less than half what Roadrunner did.
Although this is Roadrunner's last month, it will still be helping the scientists at Los Alamos. They will be taking the time to run tests on the computer operating system and memory compression, which will give them insights on how to build future supercomputers.
(Photo courtesy: Los Alamos National Laboratory)
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