IBM’s Poughkeepsie, New York facility will be the site of the test of what engineers and technicians are hoping will be the most powerful supercomputer in the world.  Named ‘Roadrunner supercomputer,’ it is said to be capable of running two times as fast the world’s current fastest supercomputer.

The new Roadrunner is a hybrid machine that its creators and testers hope will smash the petaflop barrier when tested. The petaflop barrier is the equivalent of running a four-minute mile by a human. 

Don Grice, Chief Engineer on IBM's Roadrunner project, thinks it's a race that IBM will win and that the Roadrunner will reach its goal ‘any day now.’  He went on to say, "It will enable us to tackle problems we couldn't tackle before. 

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. A petaflop is 1,000 trillion floating point operations (or flops) per second.

As a comparison, once the Roadrunner reaches the petaflop performance level it will require only one week to run a calculation that the fastest supercomputer 10 years ago would have taken 20 years to complete. 

According to Jack Dongarra, the co-creator of the Top 500 supercomputer list, "It's exciting, because it most likely will be the first computer to break the petaflop barrier. 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."

The current number one supercomputer is IBM’s BlueGene/L system, which runs at 478 teraflops, or a trillion operations per second.  It has held the number one supercomputer ranking since 2004.

The Roadrunner will be used at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory to handle national security issues, routinely test weapons systems and analyze and predict long-term climate changes, as well as to study the universe and human gene characteristics.

The Roadrunner supercomputer is actually the second version of Roadrunner; the original Roadrunner is a cluster machine that can hit 70 teraflops. It is still in use at Los Alamos.

It runs AMD Operton chips and is Linux-based. The updated Roadrunner uses Linux, as well, and gets its power boost by adding the Cell chips (originally designed jointly by IBM, Toshiba and Sony for Sony’s PlayStation 3) to the Opteron base.

The hybrid supercomputer will use the Cell chips for massive calculations. IBM’s Grice commented, "We had done enough studies to see that it's one of the best computational chips in the world. It was built to do high-performance computations for video games. The aspects that make it really good for gaming also made it really good for supercomputing. It's not running anything to do with the [operating system]. It's focused solely on calculations."

The updated version of the original Roadrunner uses 3.9 Megawatts of power (enough to power 39,000 100-Watt light bulbs). It has 6,948 dual-core Opterons on IBM LS21 Blades, as well as 12,960 Cell processors on IBM QS22 blades. The machine has 80TB of memory, 296 IBM BladeCenter H racks, requires 6,000 square feet of space, weighs 500,000 pounds and uses 57 miles of fiber optic cable.

When the IBM technicians have completed their testing of Roadrunner, it will be disassembled, packed onto 21 tractor trailer trucks and moved to Los Alamos in New Mexico, where it will be reassembled and tested again.

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