Dr. Dobb's | Roadrunner Tops BlueGene/L as Fastest Supercomputer

Roadrunner Tops BlueGene/L as Fastest Supercomputer

Los Alamos National Laboratory's cluster hits 1 petaflop/s, more than twice the speed of last year's record holder.

June 18, 2008
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/parallel/roadrunner-tops-bluegenel-as-fastest-sup/208700394

Moore's Law may not work any longer for individual processor speeds, but the speeds of the world's top supercomputers are increasing at a blistering pace. The latest list of the top 500 fastest supercomputers, announced today at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany, hands top honors to the Department of Energy's newest processing wunderkind, the IBM-built Roadrunner.

Roadrunner hit a performance benchmark of 1.026 petaflop/s, more than twice the performance of the number two competitor, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories' BlueGene/L, which clocked in at 478.2 teraflop/s. BlueGene/L had held the top position in the list for the last three and a half years.

Roadrunner is based on units powered by a version of the Cell processor, the chip that powers Sony's Playstation 3, and is one of the more energy efficient machines in the top 500. For the first time, the list tracks the systems' power consumption.

The complete list can be found here.