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Hardware

Gallery: Roadrunner: World’s fastest supercomputer

By Andy Smith June 18, 2008, 1:13 AM PDT

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Gallery: Roadrunner: World’s fastest supercomputer

Roadrunner

Roadrunner

IBM once again tops the Supercomputer 500 list but this time it’s with Roadrunner, the first supercomputer to be able to process 1 petaflop or 1 quadrillion calculations per second. Roadrunner connects 6,562 dual-core AMD Opteron chips as well as 12,240 Cell chips and runs on open-source Linux software from Red Hat.rnrn

Roadrunner resides at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory where its primary task will be to ensure the safety and reliability of the U.S’s nuclear weapons stockpile.rnrn

For more on the world’s fastest supercomputers, read Larry Dignan’s blog.

Gallery: Roadrunner: World’s fastest supercomputer

Some of the cable used to wire Roadrunner.

Gallery: Roadrunner: World’s fastest supercomputer

Technicians crawling through the floors to hook up Roadrunner.

Gallery: Roadrunner: World’s fastest supercomputer

Wiring the rack from the back.

Gallery: Roadrunner: World’s fastest supercomputer

The First CU Compute Racks (front).

Gallery: Roadrunner: World’s fastest supercomputer

Two IBM QS22 blade servers and one IBM LS21 blade server are combined into a specialized “Triblade” configuration for Roadrunner. A production Triblade.

Gallery: Roadrunner: World’s fastest supercomputer

A schematic view of the Triblade which consists of two dual-core Opterons with 16 GB RAM and four PowerXCell 8i CPUs with 16 GB Cell RAM. Click on the image to enlarge.rnrn

Credit: Henriok

Gallery: Roadrunner: World’s fastest supercomputer

Petavision

Petavision

Los Alamos and IBM researchersrntested Roadrunner with “Petavision” which models the human visual system–mimicking more than 1 billion visual neurons and trillions of synapses. rnrnrn

Credit: LeRoy N. Sanchez, Records Management, Media Services and Operations

Gallery: Roadrunner: World’s fastest supercomputer

Another view from Los Alamos.

Credit: LeRoy N. Sanchez, Records Management, Media Services and Operations

Gallery: Roadrunner: World’s fastest supercomputer

Roadrunner at Los Alamos.rnrn

trnCredit: rnLeRoy N. Sanchez, Records Management/Media Services and Operations

Gallery: Roadrunner: World’s fastest supercomputer

A schematic overview created for Wikipedia of the Roadrunner supercomuter. Click on the image to enlarge.rnrn

Credit: Henriok

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