In the last weekend the Roadrunner supercomputer, which at the time of its activation in 2008 was the most powerful in the world, was officially decommissioned. It was the first PetaFLOPs computer, which means that it’s been the first to break the petaflop barrier in its computer power.
The Roadrunner supercomputer was the result of really special design choices because it was a hybrid between two different types of processors. It was equipped with 6,480 AMD Opteron 2-core processors and each core was connected to a graphics processor PowerXCell 8i, called “Cell”. A Cell was an enhanced version of a specialized processor designed for the Sony Playstation 3 adapted specifically to support scientific computing tasks.
Roadrunner wasn’t the first hybrid computer but noone had ever tried to build a supercomputer like that. In building it that way, IBM took chances that proved successful. Thanks to that choice, Roadrunner could reach levels of computing power never seen before with the Cells carrying out the most intense parts of the calculation work.
The Roadrunner supercomputer was formed by 18 Connection Units, each containing 180 Triblade cards. Each Triblade cards contained two Opteron processors with 16 GB of RAM and four PowerXCell 8i processors with 16 GB of Cell RAM. The total Roadrunner RAM was 103.6 Terabytes. To run Roadrunner they used the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system.
Over the years, the Roadrunner supercomputer was used mostly to simulate the aging of the American nuclear arsenal but also for simulations in other scientific fields, from physics to astronomy and also for medicine.
During this month, researchers will use Roadrunner to carry out various experiments on the use of memory and data routing that will be useful in the design of future supercomputers. Once they finished this last task, Roadrunner will be dismantled. Considering the fact that it cost about $133 million it’s a shame but in this case there are security reasons so it’s inevitable that at least in part it must be literally destroyed.
Another problem that makes it difficult to reuse, even partially, Roadrunner’s Connection Units is that it consumes a lot of electricity and in the years following its manufacture leaps forward have been made from this point of view. Another supercomputer built by IBM called Juqueen requires a power of 1,970 kWatts against the 2,345 kWatts required by Roadrunner but has a computing power about four times higher.
In a few short years, Roadrunner has become a supercomputer obsolete in various ways but its construction was a pioneering undertaking. It opened the door to new ideas about the design of of supercomputer therefore Roadrunner will remain in the history of computer science.
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