IBM Roadrunner Hits The End Of The Road

IBM Roadrunner Hits The End Of The RoadAll good things must always come to an end, as nothing is permanent except death and some say, taxes. Well, IBM’s Roadrunner, what was once the world’s fastest supercomputer, has arrived at the end of its distinguished life, as it will be decommissioned Sunday. The IBM Roadrunner cost $121 million to build, and was tucked away at one of the nation’s premier nuclear weapons research laboratories that was located in northern New Mexico.

The simple reason given to the masses would be the scourge that affects us all – age. After all, the world of supercomputing is one that evolves all too rapidly, and the Roadrunner is no longer at the forefront of the race, where something smaller, faster, and more energy efficient without raking up the final bill has already hit the industry. However, the IBM Roadrunner can still lay claim to be one of the 25 fastest supercomputers in the world at this point in time.”

If there was just one thing that you could attribute to the IBM Roadrunner, it would be this. Back in 2008, the Roadrunner proved to be the first supercomputer in the world to surpass the once elusive petaflop barrier by processing slightly more than a quadrillion mathematical calculations per second, now how about that?

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IBM Roadrunner retires from the supercomputer race

IBM Roadrunner retires from the supercomputer race

For all the money and effort poured into supercomputers, their lifespans can be brutally short. See IBM’s Roadrunner as a textbook example: the 116,640-core cluster was smashing records just five years ago, and yet it’s already considered so behind the times that Los Alamos National Laboratory is taking it out of action today. Don’t mourn too much for the one-time legend, however. The blend of Opteron and Cell processors proved instrumental to understanding energy flow in weapons while also advancing the studies of HIV, nanowires and the known universe. Roadrunner should even be useful in its last gasps, as researchers will have a month to experiment with the system’s data routing and OS memory compression before it’s dismantled in earnest. It’s true that the supercomputer has been eclipsed by cheaper, faster or greener competitors, including its reborn Cray arch-nemesis — but there’s no question that we’ll have learned from Roadrunner’s brief moment in the spotlight.

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Via: NBC

Source: Los Alamos National Laboratory

2009’s Fastest Supercomputer Goes Dark Today

The world’s fastest supercomputer isn’t the world’s fastest super computer anymore, so it’s getting turned off today. At Los Alamos National Laboratory, IBM’s Roadrunner is being replaced by a faster, cheaper and more energy efficient computer, Cielo. More »

AMD unveils Open 3.0: an Opteron 6300 platform for the Open Compute Project

AMD Opteron

The Open Compute Project is pushing hard for servers that are both very scalable and streamlined, and AMD is more than willing to help with the launch of its Open 3.0 server platform. The framework combines two Opteron 6300 processors with a motherboard that contains just the essentials, yet scales to meet just about any need in a rackmount system. Among the many, many expansion options are 24 memory slots, six SATA ports for storage, as many as four PCI Express slots and a mezzanine link for custom components. Open 3.0 isn’t as flexible as a decentralized, Intel-based prototype being shown at the same time, but it’s also much closer to practical reality — a handful of companies already have access, and on-the-ground sales should start before the end of March. If all goes well, companies will have a Lego-like server base that solves their problems with precision.

Continue reading AMD unveils Open 3.0: an Opteron 6300 platform for the Open Compute Project

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Source: AMD