IBM Supercomputer Preparing to Break Petaflop Barrier
Category: General NewsPosted: May 13, 2008 01:06PM
Author: Nemo
A few days ago we reported on some recent news from the world of supercomputing and now we're back with more as IBM is putting the finishing touches on its Roadrunner supercomputer which its engineers expect to break the petaflop barrier for the first time. A petaflop is a thousand trillion floating operations per second. To put that into perspective, the current fastest supercomputer - BlueGene, also built by IBM, runs at a peak speed of 478 teraflops. Roadrunner is a hybrid design, combining X86 processors with Cell processors. The Cell processors, originally developed for use in gaming consoles, will be used solely for massive calculations and not for running the OS. When complete Roadrunner will consist of 6,948 dual-core Opteron processors, 12,960 Cell processors, have 80TB of memory, weigh in at over 500,000 pounds and draw 3.9MW of power.
