ROADRUNNER, SUPERCOMPUTER

BY NANDINI.B

INTRODUCTION TO ROADRUNNER,SUPER COMPUTER

Roadrunner was a supercomputer built by IBM for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA. The US$100-million Roadrunner was designed for a peak performance of 1.7 petaflops.It achieved 1.026 petaflops on May 25, 2008 to become the world's first TOP500 Line pack sustained 1.0 petaflops system.

WHAT IS ROADRUNNER
Roadrunner is the first general purpose computer system to reach the petaflop milestone. On June 10, 2008, IBM announced that this supercomputer had sustained a record-breaking petaflop, or 1015 floating point operations per second, as measured by the Line pack benchmark. As a result of this achievement, Roadrunner became the worlds fastest supercomputer.

WHO WAS THE INVENTOR

International Business Machines (IBM) built the Roadrunner Not only did they make the Roadrunner, they also built the Blue Gene They pioneer in computer technology, the Roadrunner is the fastest supercomputer in the world breaking the petaflop barrier at 1.7 petaflops (1,700 trillion calculations per second.)

PURPOSE AND IMPORTANCE OF THIS INVENTION

IBM built the Roadrunner for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration. The DOE plans to use this computer for simulating how nuclear materials age in order to predict whether the USAs aging arsenal of nuclear weapons are safe and reliable. Other uses for the Roadrunner include science, financial, automotive, and aerospace industries.

WHERE DID IBM INVENT THE ROADRUNNER

IBM built the Roadrunner at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA. The Roadrunner consists of 296 refrigeratorsized racks that occupies 6,000 sq. ft. of the laboratory (560 sq. km.)

WHEN WAS THE ROADRUNNER INVENTED

WHEN WAS THE ROADRUNNER INVENTED The Roadrunner was invented and developed from late December 2007 to April 2009. Test day was on May 25, 2008 when the Roadrunner achieved a top performance of 1.026 petaflops.

DEVELOPMENT OF ROADRUNNER

Roadrunner was in development from 2002 and went online in 2006. Due to its novel design and complexity it was constructed in three phases and became fully operational in 2008. Its predecessor was a machine also developed at Los Alamos named Dark Horse. This machine was one of the earliest hybrid architecture systems originally based on ARM and then moved to the Cell processor. It was entirely a 3D design, its design integrated 3D memory, networking, processors and a number of other technologies Phase 1: Build the opteron based cluster. Phase 2: Advance architecture Initial System,to include a smaller version of the hybrid usin older versions of the Cell processor. Phase 3: To reach 1 petaflops.

ROADRUNNER CLUSTER
The final cluster is made up of 18 connected units, which are connected via eight additional (secondstage) Infiniband ISR2012 switches. Each CU is connected through twelve uplinks for each secondstage switch, which makes a total of 96 uplink connections. Overall system information: 6,480 Opteron processors with 51.8 TIB RAM (in 3,240 LS21 blades) 12,960 Cell processors with 51.8 TIB RAM (in 6,480 QS22 blades) 216 System x3755 I/O nodes

ROADRUNNER SOFTWARE
The Roadrunner runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux along with Fedora 10 Linux as its operating systems. It is managed with XCAT distributed computing software. It also uses Open MPI Message Passage Interface implementation

ROADRUNNER PROCESSOR ARCHITECTURE

The Roadrunner runs on 13,284 AMD Opteron Cores @ 1.8 GHz+116,640 IBM PowerXCell 8i Cores @ 3.2GHz

TRIBLADE ARCHITECTURE
The TriBlade Architecture consists of two dualcore Opterons with 16 GB of RAM and four PowerXCell 8i CPUs with 16 GB of Cell RAM.

APPLICATIONS
1.Ensure the safety and reliability of the nations nuclear weapons stockpile 2. Roadrunner achieved the worlds fastest computational performance. It delivers high energy efficiency, landing at #3 on the Green500 list, and it enables LANL to advance research in areas such as health care and plasma physics. 3. Research into -astronomy -climate change -cosmology -energy -human genome science

CONCLUSION
RoadRunner is still currently the words fastest with a speed of 1.026 petaflops per second,according to the TOP500 announcements at the NOVEMBER 2008 supercomputing conference I Austin Texas,and it again retained the 1 possition at the June ISC09 conference.

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