With the flip of a switch on Sunday, Los Alamos National Laboratory will shut off the Roadrunner supercomputer.
The five-year-old computer was the first to break the petaflop barrier, or a million billion calculations per second, and was key to doing advanced simulations for the Stockpile Stewardship Program, LANL said. The Roadrunner, built by IBM, has 6,563 AMD Opteron processors, amped-up versions of a cell originally designed for the Sony Playstation 3.
The combination of off-the-shelf components, called a hybrid computer because the processors were not specifically built for this purpose, reduced the cost of a supercomputer.
“Roadrunner was a truly pioneering idea,” said Gary Grider of the laboratory’s high performance computing division in a news release. “Roadrunner got everyone thinking in new ways about how to build and use a supercomputer. Specialized processors are being included in new ways on new systems, and being used in novel ways. Our demonstration with Roadrunner caused everyone to pay attention.”
The advancements in supercomputing were required for nuclear testing after the U.S. signed nonproliferation treaties with Russia that prohibited new testing of weapons.
The Roadrunner project cost $120 million, and involved 200 lab employees. The Roadrunner has been replaced by the Cielo supercomputer, which can run at 1.37 petaflops.
After the machine is shut off but before it is dismantled, researchers will have about a month to do experiments on operating system memory compression techniques, and optimized data routing to help guide the design of future capacity cluster computers.
“These are things we never could try while Roadrunner was running production problems,” Grider added.
