LANL decommissions computer

Rest in peace, Roadrunner.

Roadrunner, the first supercomputer to break the once-elusive petaflop barrier — 1 million billion calculations per second — was decommissioned by Los Alamos National Laboratory on Sunday. The IBM system achieved petaflop speed in 2008, shortly after installation at the lab.

Without ceremony, the World’s Fastest Supercomputer from 2008 was to be switched off, LANL said in an announcement, adding “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,” said the LANL news release Friday announcing Roadrunner’s death.

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.

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.
— This article appeared on page C2 of the Albuquerque Journal