IBM Roadrunner is a supercomputer built by IBM at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA. Currently the world's seventh fastest computer, it is designed for a peak performance of 1.7 petaflops!. It is also the fourth-most efficient supercomputer in the world on the Supermicro Green500, with an operational rate of 444.94 megaflops per watt of power used. This Supercomputer uses RedHat Enterprise Linux as the operating system.
Roadrunner differs from many usual supercomputers in that it is a hybrid system. Usually supercomputers only use one, since such a design is easier to design and program for. To realise the full potential of Roadrunner, all software will have to be written specially for this hybrid architecture. The hybrid design consists of dual-core Opteron server processors manufactured by AMD using the standard AMD64 architecture. Attached to each Opteron core is a PowerXCell 8i processor manufactured by IBM using Power Architecture and Cell technology. As a supercomputer, the Roadrunner is considered an Opteron cluster with Cell 8i accelerators, as each node consists of a Cell attached to an Opteron core and the Opterons to each other.
Author : IndraSusanto
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