Military Supercomputer Sets Record

Military Supercomputer Sets Record

An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.

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These "components originally designed for video game machines" are Sony's [along with Toshiba and IBM] Cell processors, such as the one in the PlayStation 3. I've long known these processors were destined for huge things.
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The new machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the I.B.M. BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

The new $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference to the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers and scientists at I.B.M. and Los Alamos National Laboratory, based in Los Alamos, N.M. It will be used principally to solve classified military problems to ensure that the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. The Roadrunner will simulate the behavior of the weapons in the first fraction of a second during an explosion.

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There's already talk on top500.org about the Roadrunner. Presumably, it will take the top spot in the June 2008 list, set to come out in a week. The list will be released June 17, 2008, during the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany.

In all fairness, the Roadrunner isn't quite twice as fast as BlueGene/L anymore. It was when BGL was installed (at 478,200 PetaFLOPs), but it's received quite an upgrade since. It currently performs at 596,378 PetaFLOPs, which still pales in comparison to the Roadrunner's 1,026,000 PetaFLOPs.
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To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D’Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.

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This formula also assumes 100% accuracy, which is something us humans rarely achieve, and never sustain.
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The high-performance computing goal, known as a petaflop — one thousand trillion calculations per second — has long been viewed as a crucial milestone by military, technical and scientific organizations in the United States, as well as a growing group including Japan, China and the European Union. All view supercomputing technology as a symbol of national economic competitiveness.

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"This is equivalent to the four-minute mile of supercomputing," said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee who for several decades has tracked the performance of the fastest computers.

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The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an I.B.M. Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony’s PlayStation 3 video-game machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations.

The Roadrunner also includes a smaller number of more conventional Opteron processors, made by Advanced Micro Devices, which are already widely used in corporate servers.

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Roadrunner, which consumes roughly three megawatts of power, or about the power required by a large suburban shopping center, requires three separate programming tools because it has three types of processors. Programmers have to figure out how to keep all of the 116,640 processor cores in the machine occupied simultaneously in order for it to run effectively.

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By breaking the petaflop barrier sooner than had been generally expected, the United States’ supercomputer industry has been able to sustain a pace of continuous performance increases, improving a thousandfold in processing power in 11 years. The next thousandfold goal is the exaflop, which is a quintillion calculations per second, followed by the zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraflop.

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Here's something I didn't know; that we've increased processing power a thousandfold in the past 11 years. It's strange to think back to when there was a noticeable difference between my Pentium 166 Mhz and my friend's Pentium 133 Mhz. That was about 11 years ago, give or take.

All in all, they never mention what operating system this beast will run. I'm sure the details will come out, little at a time, but for now, the idea of 116,640 cores has me drooling!
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