There’s now a bit more information available about Roadrunner, the new supercomputer for the Los Alamos National Laboratories. We remember, AMD and IBM were fighting for months to get the contract, with a surprising result in the end: Opterons and Cell Broadband Engine (based on IBM’s Power CPU) will be used to build a hybrid supercomputer.
IBM released a bit more information (that was already five days ago, it somehow sneaked under my radar). First of all, IBM won the bid. Second, Roadrunner is supposed to have a peak-performance of 1.6 Peta-FLOPS:
The machine is to be built entirely from commercially available hardware and based on the Linux® operating system. IBM® System x™ 3755 servers based on AMD Opteron technology will be deployed in conjunction with IBM BladeCenter® H systems with Cell B.E. technology. Each system used is designed specifically for high performance implementations.
Designed also with space and power consumption issues in mind, the system will employ advanced cooling and power management technologies and will occupy only 12,000 square feet of floor space, or approximately the size of three basketball courts.
That was basically everything, no word on how the Opterons should be connected, so we’re all still waiting for more on this topic. I still bet a fiver that they’ll use HyperTransport; AMD and IBM are both members of the HyperTransport Consortium.
Thanks for the updates. I’ve already begun the whoring on my blog (http://hpcanswers.com/plog/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=56&blogId=1).
Hey,
hi there my friend, and thank you for your link to my page!
As a general policy of returning kicks for kicks and kindness to kindness, I will do the same… I just have to find which link in my blogroll to remove: a too long blogroll makes little sense. But I think I have a few candidates.
Keep up with the good work, and visit me when you wish!
Cheers,
T.
[...] OK, so much for the details, now let’s fire up the mighty oracle-mode: Is that possibly the hardware-basis for the Los Alamos Roadrunner supercomputer we’re all speculating about? Would that possibly mean that the mentioned CBEs of Roadrunner aren’t tightly integrated Co-processors to the Opteron-CPUs? Are they just going to deploy a 1350 together with a bunch of QS20 and wire them up via InfiniBand and Gigabit-Ethernet? [...]