Military supercomputer sets speed mark
U.S. scientists unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer on Monday, a $100 million machine made from components originally designed for video game consoles and performing 1,000 trillion calculations per second in a sustained exercise.
The record was accomplished by engineers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and IBM Corp. on a military computer named Roadrunner.
The computer, which will be used primarily on nuclear weapons work, is twice as fast as IBM's Blue Gene system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which itself is three times faster than any of the world's other supercomputers, according to IBM.
"The computer is a speed demon. It will allow us to solve tremendous problems," said Thomas D'Agostino, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees nuclear weapons research and maintains the warhead stockpile.
With its extraordinary speed, it will be able to simulate the performances of a warhead and help weapons scientists track warhead aging, he said.
But officials said the computer also could have a wide range of other applications in civilian engineering, medicine and science, from developing biofuels and designing more fuel-efficient cars to finding drug therapies and providing services to the financial industry.
To put the computer's speed in perspective, it has roughly the computing power of 100,000 of today's most powerful laptops stacked 2.5 kilometres high, according to IBM. Or, if each of the world's six-billion people worked on hand-held computers for 24 hours a day, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner computer can do in a single day.
'Souped up' Playstation 3
The IBM and Los Alamos engineers worked six years on the computer technology.
Some elements of the Roadrunner can be traced to popular video games, said David Turek, vice president of IBM's supercomputing programs. In some ways, he said, it's "a very souped-up Sony PlayStation 3."
"We took the basic chip design (of a PlayStation) and advanced its capability," said Turek.
But the Roadrunner supercomputer, named after the New Mexico state bird, is nothing like a video game.
The interconnecting system occupies 560 square metres with 92 kilometres of fibre optics and weighs 227,000 kilograms. Although made from commercial parts, the computer consists of 6,948 dual-core computer chips and 12,960 cell engines, and it has 80 terabytes of memory housed in 288 connected refrigerator-sized racks.
Turek said in a two-hour test on May 25 the computer achieved a "petaflop" speed of sustained performance, something no other computer had ever done. It did so again in several real applications involving classified nuclear weapons work this past weekend.
A "flop" is an acronym meaning floating-point-operations per second. One petaflop is 1,000 trillion operations per second. Only two years ago, there were no actual applications where a computer achieved 100 teraflops — a tenth of Roadrunner's speed — said Turek, noting that the tenfold advancement came over a relatively short time.