The End of the Line for Roadrunner
The Roadrunner has finally been stopped, but not by Wile. E. Coyote.
Built by IBM, the $120 million supercomputer was decommissioned on March 31. It was the first machine to ever perform at over a petaflop and from June 2008-09 was named the fastest supercomputer in the Top 500. Roadrunner is still one of the 22 fastest in the world, but it uses so much energy the cost of operating Roadrunner was just too great.
"During its five operational years, Roadrunner, part of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program to provide key computer simulations for the Stockpile Stewardship Program, was a workhorse system providing computing power for stewardship of the US nuclear deterrent, and in its early shakedown phase, a wide variety of unclassified science," Los Alamos lab said in an announcement.
Despite the fact that Roadrunner was still one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, the energy it used was over twice that of similar machines. While Roadrunner required 2,345 kilowatts to reach 1.042 petaflops, another supercomputer required just 1,177 kilowatts to hit that benchmark, and yet another consumed only 493 kilowatts to hit 1.035 petaflops.
"Although other hybrid computers existed, none were at the supercomputing scale," Los Alamos said.
The first supercomputer of its kind, Roadrunner had 296 server racks that covered 6,000 square feet. The racks were connected with InfiniBand and contained 122,400 processor cores. The hybrid architecture used IBM PowerXCell 8i CPUs, which were an enhanced version of the Sony PlayStation 3 processor, and AMD Opteron dual-core processors.
"Future supercomputers will need to improve on Roadrunner’s energy efficiency to make the power bill affordable," Los Alamos wrote. "Future supercomputers will also need new solutions for handling and storing the vast amounts of data involved in such massive calculations."
Now that Roadrunner has gone dark, researchers will spend April performing experiments on “operating system memory compression techniques for an ASC relevant application, and optimized data routing to help guide the design of future capacity cluster computers.” Once the experiments are complete, Roadrunner will be dismantled, and somewhere Wile E. Coyote will be smiling.
Roadrunner will be replaced by Cielo, which is billed as faster, cheaper, and more energy-efficient.
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