Roadrunner may be first to break petaflop barrier -- the 4-minute mile of supercomputing
Engineers and technicians at IBM are assembling the final pieces of what they hope will soon become the world's most powerful supercomputer -- one that is capable of running twice as fast as today's fastest machine. [Click on these links to learn more about the effort in a video and a photo gallery featuring the supercomputer and its developers at IBM's Poughkeepsie, N.Y., facility]
The latest version of IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer is a hybrid machine that its builders expect will bust through the lofty petaflop barrier when it's tested this month. The supercomputing world's equivalent of the four-minute mile, the petaflop barrier is a goal that many computer makers, including Cray Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Silicon Graphics Inc., are shooting for.
Don Grice, chief engineer on IBM's Roadrunner project, thinks it's a race that IBM will win.
"We will break the petascale barrier," he told Computerworld at IBM's Poughkeepsie, N.Y., facilities. "The only unknown for me will be what day it is. I don't think there's any technical reason we won't make it. The only hurdle left is persistence."
The new supercomputer will be used at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory to work on national security problems, run annual tests of various nuclear weapons systems and predict long-term climate changes, according to John Morrison, leader of the high-performance computing division at Los Alamos. He noted that the system will also be used to study the universe and human genes.
"It will enable us to tackle problems we couldn't tackle before," he said. "Essentially, we'll be able to run a different level of problems. We'll be able to do calculations that we wouldn't even consider before." Morrison noted that the lab's contract calls for the new Roadrunner to reach the petaflop performance level.
Grice said the new machine would need a single week to run a calculation that the fastest supercomputer 10 years ago would have needed 20 years to complete.
If Roadrunner does break the petaflop barrier this month, it will mark the first time that IBM's BlueGene system hasn't held the highest position in the Top500 supercomputer list since November of 2004, according to Jack Dongarra a co-creator of the Top 500 list.
A petaflop is 1,000 trillion floating point operations (or flops) per second. BlueGene runs at 478 teraflops, which is a trillion operations per second.
"It's exciting, because it most likely will be the first computer to break the petaflop barrier," said Dongarra. "It's the next golden ring of computing. It's the next big marker. Today, all of the top 500 supercomputers are at the teraflop rate."
Friday, September 19, 2008
TOp 500 SuPerComputeR SiTeS
TOP500 tracks Power consumption values of supercomputersSun, 2008-06-15 19:23
june2008 power
For the first time, the TOP500 list is also providing power consumption values for many of the computing systems and it will continue tracking them in consistent manner. As “name-plate” power ratings can be several times higher than actual consumed power levels, we decided not to report name-plate or peak-power ratings at all and to report measured values only.
31st TOP500 List of World’s Most Powerful Supercomputers Topped by World’s First Petaflop/s System 2008-06-14 00:03
june2008
MANNHEIM, Germany; BERKELEY, Calif. & KNOXVILLE, Tenn.—With the publication of the latest edition of the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers today (Wednesday, June 18), the global high performance computing community has officially entered a new realm—a supercomputer with a peak performance of more than 1 petaflop/s (one quadrillion floating point operations per second).
»
Read more
International Supercomputing Conference to Host First Panel Discussion on Breaking the Petaflop/s BarrierMon, 2008-06-09 15:26 isc petaflops roadrunner
With the June 9 announcement that “RoadRunner” is the first system to reach the 1 petaflop/s level, the HPC community is entering a realm of unprecedented computing power.
Will the first Petaflop/s system make it into the next TOP500?Wed, 2008-03-12 05:53
petaflop top500
The 31st list will be released during the Opening Session of the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC’08) in Dresden, Germany. We are curious to see whether the first Petaflop/s system will have made it into the next TOP500. One of the hot candidates certainly is Roadrunner at LANL in Los Alamos, USA.
Roadrunner Takes the Gold in the Petaflop Race Tue, 2008-06-10 20:20 petaflops roadrunner
On June 10, IBM announced that LANL Roadrunner supercomputer reached a record-breaking one petaflop -- a quadrillion floating point operations per second -- using the standard Linpack benchmark. It is the first general-purpose computer to reach this milestone. The new performance record represents more than twice the computational power of the reigning TOP500 champ, Lawrence Livermore's Blue Gene/L supercomputer. » field_read_more[0]['url'] ?>">Read more
8th edition of the Top 50 list of the most powerful computers in Russia releasedWed, 2008-04-16 00:41 russia top50
The Research Computing Centre of the Lomonosov Moscow State University and the Joint Supercomputer Centre of the Russian academy of science announce the release of the 8th edition of the Top 50 list of the most powerful computers in Russia and CIS (former Soviet Union countries).
»
Read more
Submissions for next list now openWed, 2008-03-19 16:36 submissions
The submission for the next release of the TOP500 list is now open. The 31st list will be released during the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany during the opening session. Submission deadline for the 31st release of the TOP500 List is April 15th (23:59 PST). All system reported have to be installed by May 15th.
The TOP500 Project: Looking Back over 15 Years of Supercomputing Experience Sat, 2008-01-19 23:37 Meuer top500
Hans Meuer looks back over 15 years of supercomputing experience starting with the Mannheim supercomputing statistics in 1986 and then moving forward with the TOP500 project, launched in 1993. Twice a year, a list of the sites operating the world’s 500 most powerful computer systems is compiled and released. The best performance on the Linpack benchmark is used as the measurement for ranking the computer systems.
2007 China Top 100 List releasedTue, 2007-11-27 17:16 china top500
The annual Top 100 supercomputers list in china has been released by the Specialty Association of Mathematical & Scientific Software (SAMSS). The list reports on publicly announced computers on the PRC Mainland only.
Certificates for November 2007 are now availableTue, 2007-11-27 16:33
Certificates nov07 top500
TOP500 Certificates for entries that made it into the the last list which was released in Reno on November 12th are now available for download.
june2008 power
For the first time, the TOP500 list is also providing power consumption values for many of the computing systems and it will continue tracking them in consistent manner. As “name-plate” power ratings can be several times higher than actual consumed power levels, we decided not to report name-plate or peak-power ratings at all and to report measured values only.
31st TOP500 List of World’s Most Powerful Supercomputers Topped by World’s First Petaflop/s System 2008-06-14 00:03
june2008
MANNHEIM, Germany; BERKELEY, Calif. & KNOXVILLE, Tenn.—With the publication of the latest edition of the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers today (Wednesday, June 18), the global high performance computing community has officially entered a new realm—a supercomputer with a peak performance of more than 1 petaflop/s (one quadrillion floating point operations per second).
»
Read more
International Supercomputing Conference to Host First Panel Discussion on Breaking the Petaflop/s BarrierMon, 2008-06-09 15:26 isc petaflops roadrunner
With the June 9 announcement that “RoadRunner” is the first system to reach the 1 petaflop/s level, the HPC community is entering a realm of unprecedented computing power.
Will the first Petaflop/s system make it into the next TOP500?Wed, 2008-03-12 05:53
petaflop top500
The 31st list will be released during the Opening Session of the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC’08) in Dresden, Germany. We are curious to see whether the first Petaflop/s system will have made it into the next TOP500. One of the hot candidates certainly is Roadrunner at LANL in Los Alamos, USA.
Roadrunner Takes the Gold in the Petaflop Race Tue, 2008-06-10 20:20 petaflops roadrunner
On June 10, IBM announced that LANL Roadrunner supercomputer reached a record-breaking one petaflop -- a quadrillion floating point operations per second -- using the standard Linpack benchmark. It is the first general-purpose computer to reach this milestone. The new performance record represents more than twice the computational power of the reigning TOP500 champ, Lawrence Livermore's Blue Gene/L supercomputer. » field_read_more[0]['url'] ?>">Read more
8th edition of the Top 50 list of the most powerful computers in Russia releasedWed, 2008-04-16 00:41 russia top50
The Research Computing Centre of the Lomonosov Moscow State University and the Joint Supercomputer Centre of the Russian academy of science announce the release of the 8th edition of the Top 50 list of the most powerful computers in Russia and CIS (former Soviet Union countries).
»
Read more
Submissions for next list now openWed, 2008-03-19 16:36 submissions
The submission for the next release of the TOP500 list is now open. The 31st list will be released during the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany during the opening session. Submission deadline for the 31st release of the TOP500 List is April 15th (23:59 PST). All system reported have to be installed by May 15th.
The TOP500 Project: Looking Back over 15 Years of Supercomputing Experience Sat, 2008-01-19 23:37 Meuer top500
Hans Meuer looks back over 15 years of supercomputing experience starting with the Mannheim supercomputing statistics in 1986 and then moving forward with the TOP500 project, launched in 1993. Twice a year, a list of the sites operating the world’s 500 most powerful computer systems is compiled and released. The best performance on the Linpack benchmark is used as the measurement for ranking the computer systems.
2007 China Top 100 List releasedTue, 2007-11-27 17:16 china top500
The annual Top 100 supercomputers list in china has been released by the Specialty Association of Mathematical & Scientific Software (SAMSS). The list reports on publicly announced computers on the PRC Mainland only.
Certificates for November 2007 are now availableTue, 2007-11-27 16:33
Certificates nov07 top500
TOP500 Certificates for entries that made it into the the last list which was released in Reno on November 12th are now available for download.
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