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Five years ago, IBM, commissioned by the US Department of Energy, created a supercomputer to simulate the collapse of the US nuclear arsenal. At that time, Roadrunner was considered the most productive computer in the world. In June 2008, a supercomputer with a capacity of more than one quadrillion operations per second (petaflops) won first place in the Top 500 list. The rank of the strongest computer Roadrunner was last confirmed in June 2009. Today it is recognized as obsolete and subject to write-off.
According to the resource Arstechnica, the supercomputer installed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico will be studied first and then dismantled. Although Roadrunner is still considered one of the most productive computers in the world (22nd), by today's standards it is not considered energy efficient enough because it consumes too much energy.
“In five years, Roadrunner, which became part of the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program of the National Nuclear Security Agency of the USA, has done a lot of scientific work,”
- Said a representative of the Center for Defense Nuclear Research in the city of Los Alamos.
Roadrunner worth more than $ 120 million uses 122,400 processors on 296 server racks with an InfiniBand connection. All this covers an area of approximately 560 square meters. The supercomputer has a hybrid build scheme of IBM PowerXCell 8i and AMD Opteron dual-core. AMD processors are responsible for performing core tasks, and Cell solutions take on large amounts of computation, acting as an accelerator.
In November 2009, Roadrunner transferred the title of the fastest computer in the world to the Jaguar computer on the AMD Opteron and Cray hybrid architecture, which also entered the US Department of Energy. Today, the 1.76 petaflops Jaguar is part of a larger cluster called Titan. The Cray Titan supercomputer finished first in the top last November with a score of 17.6 petaflops.
Currently, scientists are working on computing systems, whose performance reaches 1000 petaflops. However, the issue of energy efficiency remains open.
The Roadrunner supercomputer can still be used for scientific purposes, but in terms of energy efficiency it is significantly inferior to its competitors. According to the November supercomputer rating, Roadrunner must consume 2,345 kW of power to achieve a performance of 1,042 petaflops - 22nd place in the list. For this purpose, supercomputer number 21 requires 1177 kW, and number 23 (capacity 1,035 petaflops) - only 493 kW of electricity.
“Improving the availability and performance of next-generation supercomputers is needed through energy conservation. Future computing systems will require the introduction of new technologies for processing and storing large amounts of data ",
- They say in the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
After shutting down the system, scientists will explore Roadrunner for another month. Then the first petaflop supercomputer will be completely dismantled and retired.
The time when supercomputers are equipped with artificial intelligence is not long enough. IBM scientists are already working on such a supercar.
The article is based on materials .
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