IBM 'Roadrunner' Supercomputer, Once The World's Fastest, Taken Offline Today

Easter Sunday may be a time associated with rejuvenation and renewal, but today none can save the IBM-built supercomputer considered just five years ago the most advanced of its kind.

Developed to model the decay of the U.S. arsenal of nuclear weapons, the so-called Roadrunner supercomputer, located at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, was shown to reach data speeds no other system in the world could match --- 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.

According to a report in Ars Technica, Roadrunner led the list of "Top 500" most powerful supercomputers in June and November 2008 and again in June 2009.

Costing more than $120 million and covering 6,000 square feet, Roadrunner's 296 server racks contained 122,400 processor cores. The supercomputer's hybrid design used IBM PowerXCell 8i CPUs, which are an enhanced version of the Sony PlayStation 3 processor, and AMD Opteron dual-core processors.

The AMD processors handled basic tasks, with the Cell CPUs "taking on the most computationally intense parts of a calculation-thus acting as a computational accelerator," a Los Alamos statement read.

But, even though Roadrunner remains one of the 22 fastest supercomputers in the world, it uses too much energy for the government to justify keeping it on.

So, today the supercomputer was declared obsolete and taken offline --- although it will be studied a while longer before being dismantled.

"During its five operational years, Roadrunner, part of the National Nuclear Security Administration's Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program to provide key computer simulations for the Stockpile Stewardship Program, was a workhorse system providing computing power for stewardship of the US nuclear deterrent, and in its early shakedown phase, a wide variety of unclassified science," the Los Alamos announcement said.

"Many doubted that a hybrid supercomputer would work, so for Los Alamos and IBM, Roadrunner was a leap of faith... As part of its Stockpile Stewardship work, Roadrunner took on a difficult, long-standing gap in understanding of energy flow in a weapon and its relation to weapon yield," Los Alamos said.

"Although other hybrid computers existed, none were at the supercomputing scale."