The world's fastest supercomputer, Roadrunner, at Los
Alamos National Laboratory has completed its initial "shakedown"
phase doing accelerated petascale computer modeling and simulations of a variety
of unclassified, fundamental science projects.
The Roadrunner system is now beginning its transition to classified computing
to assure the safety, security, and reliability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent.
Capitalizing on this national security investment, 10 unclassified projects
were selected for this opportunity to use Roadrunner, a hybrid-architecture,
1.105 petaflop/s computing system, during a six-month period that ended in September
2009.
These projects were also used to put a "work load" on the Roadrunner
system so that scientists could optimize the way large codes are able to run
on the machine. The Roadrunner open science projects represent the best of science,
and the value of enabling technologies at Los Alamos, and were selected from
across the Laboratory by a special committee.
A sampling of the projects include:
- ORIGINS OF THE UNSEEN UNIVERSE - Astrophysicists have created the largest-ever
computer model of an expanding, accelerating universe to help scientists understand
both dark matter and dark energy, two cosmic constituents that remain a mystery.
- THE LARGEST HIV EVOLUTIONARY TREE - Mapping Darwinian phylogenic evolutionary
relationships for large numbers of Human Immunodeficiency Virus genetic sequences
results in an HIV family tree that may lead researchers to new vaccine focus
areas.
- NONLINEAR PHYSICS OF HIGH-POWERED LASERS - Computer scientists adapt VPIC,
a particle-in-cell plasma physics code, to simulate laser plasma interactions
on the Roadrunner petascale supercomputer - models critical to understanding
inertial confinement fusion at the National Ignition Facility.
- MODELING TINY NANOWIRES AT LONG TIME-SCALES - How nanowires break under
stress is simulated atom-by-atom over a period of time that is closer than
ever to experimental reality to see how the movement of single atoms can change
a material's mechanical or electrical properties.
- EXPLORING MAGNETIC RECONNECTION - Magnetic reconnection is a basic process
that occurs within hot ionized gases known as plasmas. This process often
leads to an explosive release of energy that is stored within the magnetic
fields, and plays a key role in the earth's magnetosphere, solar flares, magnetic
fusion machines, and a variety of astrophysical problems.
- HOW SHOCK WAVES CAUSE MATERIALS TO FAIL - Physicists use SPaSM computer
code to conduct multibillion-atom molecular dynamics simulations of materials
as extreme shock-wave stresses break the materials into pieces, for the first
time attempting to create atomic-scale models that describe how voids are
created, how materials may swell or shrink under stress, and how a once-broken
bond might reform.
About Roadrunner, the world's fastest supercomputer, first to break
the petaflop barrier
On Memorial Day, May 26, 2008, the "Roadrunner" supercomputer exceeded
a sustained speed of 1 petaflop/s, or 1 million billion calculations per second.
"Petaflop/s" is computer jargon—peta signifying the number 1
followed by 15 zeros (sometimes called a quadrillion) and flop/s meaning "floating
point operation per second." Shortly after that it was named the world's
fastest supercomputer by the TOP500 organization at the June 2008 International
Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany.
The Roadrunner supercomputer, developed by IBM in partnership with the Laboratory
and the National Nuclear Security Administration, will be used to perform advanced
physics and predictive simulations in a classified mode to assure the safety,
security, and reliability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent. The system will be
used by scientists at the NNSA's Los Alamos, Sandia, and Lawrence Livermore
national laboratories.
The secret to its record-breaking performance is a unique hybrid design. Each
compute node in this cluster consists of two AMD Opteron™ dual-core processors
plus four PowerXCell 8i™ processors used as computational accelerators.
The accelerators used in Roadrunner are a special IBM-developed variant of the
Cell processor used in the Sony PlayStation 3®. The node-attached Cell accelerators
are what make Roadrunner different than typical clusters.
Roadrunner is still currently the world's fastest with a speed of 1.105 petaflop/s
per second, according to the TOP500 announcement at the November 2008 Supercomputing
Conference in Austin Texas, and it again retained the #1 position at the June
ISC09 conference.
Posted October 26th, 2009
