Email
Rest in peace, Roadrunner.
Roadrunner, the first supercomputer to break the once-elusive petaflop barrier – one million billion calculations per second – will be decommissioned by Los Alamos National Laboratory on Sunday. The IBM system achieved petaflop speed in 2008, shortly after installation at the lab.
“Without ceremony, this weekend the World’s Fastest Supercomputer from 2008 will be switched off,” LANL said in an announcement. “But it will not be forgotten. Advancements made possible by Roadrunner have informed current computing architectures and will help shape future designs.”
“Even in death,” said Gary Grider of the lab’s High Performance Computing Division, “we are trying to learn from Roadrunner.”
Roadrunner’s design was unique and controversial. It combined two different kinds of processors, making it a “hybrid.” It had 6,563 dual-core general-purpose processors (they were AMD Opterons), with each core linked to a special graphics processor (a PowerXCell 8i) called a “Cell,” which was an enhanced version of a specialized processor originally designed for the Sony Playstation 3, adapted specifically to support scientific computing.
Although other hybrid computers existed, none were at the supercomputing scale. Many doubted that a hybrid supercomputer could work, so for Los Alamos and IBM, Roadrunner was “a leap of faith,” the LANL news release issued Friday- Roadrunner’s death notice – said.
High-speed calculation was the primary goal.
According to LANL, when a computer is fast enough to improve simulation detail and fidelity with reasonable turnaround time, the results deepen scientists’ understanding of the phenomena they’re studying.
And the phenomena that Roadrunner focused on were aspects of LANL’s “stockpile stewardship” work, maintaining and ensuring the safety of the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal.
“As part of its Stockpile Stewardship work, Roadrunner took on a difficult, long-standing gap in understanding of energy flow in a weapon and its relation to weapon yield,” the lab’s news release says.
“Roadrunner and its successes have positioned us well to weather the technology changes on the HPC (high-performing computer) horizon as we implement stockpile modernization without recourse to underground testing,” said Chris Deeney, the National Nuclear Security Admininstration’s assistant deputy administrator for stockpile stewardship.
In the area of general science, Roadrunner provided a platform to study a wide variety of scientific unknowns at an unprecedented scale. Research included nanowire material behavior, magnetic reconnection, laser backscatter, HIV phylogenetics and a simulation of the universe at a 70-billion-particle scale.
“Roadrunner was a truly pioneering idea,” said Grider. “Roadrunner got everyone thinking in new ways about how to build and use a supercomputer. Specialized processors are being included in new ways on new systems, and being used in novel ways. Our demonstration with Roadrunner caused everyone to pay attention.”
“What Roadrunner did was exactly what it was intended to do: get the weapons codes moving toward new architectures,” said Cheryl Wampler of the Weapons Physics directorate. “Roadrunner was challenging because the supercomputing future was challenging.”
The lab’s announcement said it’s estimated that, some time between 2020 and 2030, supercomputers will reach the exascale-one quintillion calculations per second- or one thousand times faster than Roadrunner.
Roadrunner once fastest in worldWeb Headline
End of the Road for Roadrunner
