Roadrunner Retires – World's First Petascale System Helped Steward Nuclear Stockpile

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There are now something like 30 petascale supercomputers in the world that we know about, but the one that started it all has now retired. Used to help steward the U.S. nuclear stockpile, the Roadrunner supercomputer at Los Alamos was shut down this week after six years of service.

Roadrunner exemplified stockpile stewardship: an excellent team integrating complex codes with advanced computing architectures to ensure a safe, secure and effective deterrent,” said Chris Deeney, NNSA Assistant Deputy Administrator for Stockpile Stewardship. “Roadrunner and its successes have positioned us well to weather the technology changes on the HPC horizon as we implement stockpile modernization without recourse to underground testing.”

IBM built Roadrunner for the DOE National Nuclear Security Administration using a hybrid design with 12,960 IBM PowerXCell 8i and 6,480 AMD Opteron dual-core processors connected by Infiniband. Read the Full Story.