'Roadrunner' computer sets record: Over 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second

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As The New York Times reports, this computer does have some actual uses:

The new $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference to the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers and scientists at I.B.M. and Los Alamos National Laboratory, based in Los Alamos, N.M. It will be used principally to solve classified military problems to ensure that the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. The Roadrunner will simulate the behavior of the weapons in the first fraction of a second during an explosion

Before it is placed in a classified environment, it will also be used to explore scientific problems like climate change. The greater speed of the Roadrunner will make it possible for scientists to test global climate models with higher accuracy.

To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D’Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.

That may happen, with food prices the way they are. Even so, this is obviously no cyber-trivia in progress. The number of calculations refers to the sort of number-crunching which uses up ungodly amounts of research time and money. From the text, Roadrunner could well be a realistic prototype for some of the hardware sciences like genetics and astronomy are howling for.

Cometh the sales pitch:

The machine is an unusual blend of chips used in consumer products and advanced parallel computing technologies. The lessons that computer scientists learn by making it calculate even faster are seen as essential to the future of both personal and mobile consumer computing.

The high-performance computing goal, known as a petaflop — one thousand trillion calculations per second — has long been viewed as a crucial milestone by military, technical and scientific organizations in the United States, as well as a growing group including Japan, China and the European Union. All view supercomputing technology as a symbol of national economic competitiveness.

“Parallel computing” is the real achievement here. It refers to computers performing more than one task at a time, and it’s the limiting factor on many PCs. If Roadrunner works on a hybrid hardware approach, that may be what’s been lacking in parallel capacity in consumer-level computers.

There’s quite a bit of industry hoopla involved, but the parallel capacity comes from IBM chips developed for Playstation 3:

… The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations.

The Roadrunner also includes a smaller number of more conventional Opteron processors, made by Advanced Micro Devices, which are already widely used in corporate servers.

That’s where the capacity would have to come from, big carthorse-like things that can take massive data loads.

I can already see the copy for the domestic version of Roadrunner:

A breathy female voiceover:

“For all your cyber-megalomaniacal needs…”

Well, some of them…