IBM's latest supercomputer crunches numbers at enormous speeds--and will soon be put to use for nuclear warfare
Posted 06.12.2008 at 8:56 am
15 Comments
Roadrunner
IBM
IBM has broken its own record of computer processing speed by pushing its newest supercomputer past the petaflop barrier. The Roadrunner, a massive machine occupying 6,000 square feet of space, this week achieved a peak of 1.026 petaflops, or just over one million billion calculations per second. Just ten years ago, the fastest supercomputer in the world would have taken 20 years to finish a problem the Roadrunner is capable of finishing in a week. It's also the first hybrid supercomputer, using a combination of traditional AMD dual core chips and Cell processors, the kind of chip found in the PlayStation. It divides tasks by assigning standard processing to the AMD chips while giving processor-intensive mathematical work to the Cell chips.
The machine is bound later this summer for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where it will tackle a variety of complicated scientific problems, such as climate change, how vaccines should be administered, and mapping regions of the human brain. Ultimately, however, the computer will be dedicated to analyzing and solving questions surrounding nuclear weapons and how best to maintain the safety of our existing arsenal.
Via Guardian
Want to learn more about breakthroughs in electronics, medicine, nanotech, and more?
Subscribe to Popular Science and enter to win $5,000!
Subscribe to Popular Science and enter to win $5,000!
15 Comments
To comment, please Login.
Download Our iPhone App
Stay up to date on the latest news of the future of science and technology from your iPhone with full articles, images and offline viewing
Follow Us On Twitter
Featuring every article from the magazine and website, plus links from around the Web. Also see our PopSci DIY feed
Become a Fan On Facebook
Share links with friends, comment on stories and more
December 2009: Best of What's New
In our December issue, Popular Science names the 100 best innovations of the year: bombproof wallpaper, self-parking cars, the fastest helicopter, and 97 more. Plus inventor profiles and videos.
Check out the best of what's new here.
Popular Science Photo Pool
Popular on Popsci
Most Viewed
Science
- Mesmerizing, Isn't It?
- New Reactor Uses Sunlight to Turn Water and Carbon Dioxide Into Fuel
- Man Diagnosed 'Comatose' For 23 Years Was Actually Conscious All Along
- Modified Algae Produce Clean, Easy Hydrogen
- NASA Scientists Say Martian Meteorite May Have Brought Life to Earth
- World's First Osmotic Power Plant Goes Live in Norway
- Yikes: Peruvian Jungle Gang Arrested for Selling Fat of Its Murder Victims
- Liquid Cooling Bags For Data Centers Could Trim Cost and Carbon By 90 Percent
- Revitalized LHC Manages to Collide Protons
- This Week in the Future, November 16-20, 2009
Most Commented
Science
- This Week in the Future, November 16-20, 2009
- This Week in the Future, November 23-26, 2009: Thanksgiving Special
- New Reactor Uses Sunlight to Turn Water and Carbon Dioxide Into Fuel
- So Much For "Hopenhagen"
- President Obama Hopes to Jumpstart Science and Technology Education With New Initiative
- Modified Algae Produce Clean, Easy Hydrogen
- Revitalized LHC Manages to Collide Protons
- NASA Scientists Say Martian Meteorite May Have Brought Life to Earth
- Mesmerizing, Isn't It?
- Man Diagnosed 'Comatose' For 23 Years Was Actually Conscious All Along
Most Emailed
Science
- New Reactor Uses Sunlight to Turn Water and Carbon Dioxide Into Fuel
- World's First Osmotic Power Plant Goes Live in Norway
- President Obama Hopes to Jumpstart Science and Technology Education With New Initiative
- Modified Algae Produce Clean, Easy Hydrogen
- Hideous Naked Mole Rat Strikes Again, This Time With Clues for Surviving Stroke
- Danish Island Becomes One of the First Energy-Self-Sufficient Places On Earth
- Econophysicist Claims Rogue Waves Could Account for Volatility in Financial Markets
- Something in the Water Is Feminizing Male Fish. Are We Next?
- This Week in the Future, November 23-26, 2009: Thanksgiving Special
- NASA Scientists Say Martian Meteorite May Have Brought Life to Earth
Today on PopSci.com
Copyright © 2009 Popular Science
A Bonnier Corporation Company. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
It still can't run 'Crysis' on very high.
Its not built to play games though it probably could run crysis
from Richland, WA
Life is a game... and I enjoy winning ;-D
from Richland, WA
Anyone know how many CPU's it uses? probably around a 1,000
"Crysis" is lame anyhow though
can i play assassins creed on this thing?
Don't remember the exact numbers, but it has arround 3500 Blade Servers that have 1 AMD processor and 2 Cell Chip each. So total Processor count is well over 3000. I bet in 10 more years our home computers will have stats close to this one if they manage to advance the Silicon-Germanium technology.
One TriBlade has 2 AMDs and 4 Cell chips. And the total count of processors would be over 6000 for AMD and over 12000 for Cell Chips. 18,000 processors...
Skynet?
it would be something like skynet since its used 4 military
i think they would probly use it for FCS
.
FYI this comp would be able 2 play every single game on the earth
You would think with all of the money and technology that IBM has, that they would be able to fabricate only 1 processor, motherboard, etc. (however large it would have to be) to do the same thing that 6,000sqft of computer can do now. I understand that they would still need the storage space of today, but that would not entail 6,000 sqft. Such a waste of time and effort on IBM's part.
If they did do what I said above then you can only imagine the capapbility that our computer systems would have now.
You think my wife will let me get one for the basement??
from kenmore, wa
What did this cost us tax payers? What are we getting for the millions of $$$ spent on this project?
I'm impressed by this project. I hope it was money well spent.
Michael McGinn
GeekZoneBooks.Com
It's IBM's computer, so I'm going to guess IBM payed for it, not the US government.
Also, IBM could not build something like this on a single motherboard, technology like that doesn't exist, and the motherboard would melt itself and everything around it.
The processor count is 12,960 IBM PowerXCell 8i CPUs and 6,480 AMD Opteron dual-core processors.