IBM is the company behind the world’s fastest supercomputer and it has no intention of letting go of that position. That IBM would use its hyped Cell architecture in its next supercomputer project is in no way a surprise, but that it would team up with AMD to trump its own supercomputer BlueGene/L was perhaps not as expected. IBM recently published information about its Roadrunner project which will be a supercomputer which will literally fly by BlueGene/L. It has now announced that Roadrunner will be a hybrid using both IBM’s Cell processors and AMD’s Opteron processors. To be more precise, about 16,000 of each processor model.
IBM is aiming to reach the magical 1 petaflop with Roadrunner and the system will actually have a capacity of a lot more than that. It is counting on reaching a maximal performance of about 1.6 Petaflops. BlueGene/L has a theoretic peak at 0.367 Petaflops (367 teraflops). Exactly how IBM will use AMD’s Opteron architecture with Roadrunner is a bit uncertain.
“IBM’s statement yesterday did offer a few clues. So-called “typical computing processes,” the company said, will be handled by the Opteron CPU bank, including file I/O and communication. Some at AMD might say just one Opteron processor handles that job well enough, let alone 2 to the 14th power Opterons.”
There’s no doubt it’s going to be interesting to follow IBM’s work with Roadrunner and we’re eagerly waiting to find out why IBM has chosen to use AMD’s Opteron architecture and why so many.
