LANL's RoadRunner To Enter Phase-3 [Pending Approval]

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

A bit on the belated side, but Los Alamos National Lab has announced that it will seek final approval from the National Nuclear Security Administration to build out the third and final phase of RoadRunner. RoadRunner was designed as one of the first large-scale, hybrid computing platforms. It combines COTS IBM Opteron-based compute nodes with Cell accelerators at a ratio of one Opteron core per Cell [4 per node]. The end result is slated to break a Petaflop.

Roadrunner ushers in a new era in high performance computing,” said Terry Wallace, principal associate director for science, technology, and engineering (PADSTE).

The machine has been in development as a partnership between IBM and LANL since early 2006. The first phase of RoadRunner included a cluster capable of reaching 71 teraflops. Phase-2 of the project was completed in October of 2007. Following Phase-2, two external assessments were performed in order to evaluate whether relevant applications could be adapted to run on the hybrid architecture. Both the NNSA HQ team and a team of independent HPC experts gave the green light to proceed.

Read the full article here.