Monday, June 09, 2008
The Roadrunner is the first running by Petaflops milestone
An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.
The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an I.B.M. Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony’s PlayStation 3 video-game machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations.
The Roadrunner also includes a smaller number of more conventional Opteron processors, made by Advanced Micro Devices, which are already widely used in corporate servers.
The first teraflops computer has been ran by 9298 Intel Pentium 2 Xeon processors in 1997. Now, Intel shows that power in a single Larrabee chip, that obviously shows trend of miniaturisation of supercomputers into the chips, revealing at the same time their internal complexity.
The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an I.B.M. Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony’s PlayStation 3 video-game machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations.
The Roadrunner also includes a smaller number of more conventional Opteron processors, made by Advanced Micro Devices, which are already widely used in corporate servers.
The first teraflops computer has been ran by 9298 Intel Pentium 2 Xeon processors in 1997. Now, Intel shows that power in a single Larrabee chip, that obviously shows trend of miniaturisation of supercomputers into the chips, revealing at the same time their internal complexity.
THIS LINK posted by Joseph Bell : 8:28 AM
