Roadrunner: A New Age of Super- computing

Roadrunner
Credit: LeRoy N. Sanchez, Records Management/Media Services and Operations

Laboratory officials celebrated Los Alamos's decision to pursue, pending approval by the National Nuclear Security Administration, the final phase of Roadrunner, a high-performance computer (HPC) slated to become the computational cornerstone of Laboratory mission-related work.

"Roadrunner ushers in a new era in high performance computing," said Terry Wallace, principal associate director for science, technology, and engineering (PADSTE). Wallace praised the hard work and dedication of the entire Roadrunner Project Team at the celebration last Thursday.

Roadrunner is designed to achieve a sustained operating speed of 1,000 trillion calculations each second, or a "petaflop/s" in computer jargon-peta signifying the number 10 followed by 15 zeros, and flop/s meaning "floating point operation per second." The fastest current supercomputer is rated at 478 teraflop/s (teraflop/s meaning one trillion floating point operations per second); Roadrunner would be roughly 3 times faster.

The computer will be developed in partnership with IBM and will utilize commercially available hardware, including aspects of commercial gaming and graphics technologies. Because of its off-the-shelf design, the computer costs significantly less than a one-of-a-kind machine. It uses a Linux operating system.........