Supercomputers have always been interesting to me because of the sheer power that they harness, and someday I would like to see one first-hand. According to Wikipedia though a “quad-core Xeon workstation running at 2.66 GHz will outperform a multimillion dollar Cray C90 supercomputer used in the early 1990s.” So having you’re own personal supercomputer isn’t out of the question, but don’t expect to break any records like the newly unveiled IBM Roadrunner does.
The $133 million IBM Roadrunner supercomputer takes the crown with its smashing 1.026 quadrillion calculations it’s capable of performing every second. It’s twice as fast as the IBM BlueGene/L located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Calfornia, which was the previous record holder. The IBM Roadrunner’s home is in New Mexico at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. It will primarily be used for military purposes, such as making sure their nuclear weapons will continue to work properly as they age, and also simulating the first fraction of a second during a nuclear explosion.
The IBM Roadrunner is composed of 6,480 dual-core Opterons with a whopping 51.8TB of RAM. To give you a sense it’s power the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration said that if all 6 billion people on earth used hand calculators 24/7 it would take 46 years to accomplish what this supercomputer can do in one day.
What they don’t want you to know about is the “classified” LAN party they have there every night for playing Crysis. Nah, just kidding. It’s running Red Hat Enterprise Linux so there won’t be too much gaming going on there.
Supercomputers are cool, but…
Its disgusting how much money we have to spend just in *computing* power to support nuclear weapons.
Seriously, WTF is so interesting about the first few moments of a nuclear detonation that we need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on this stuff?
Oh and of course these computers not only compute, but depreciate, at the speed of light.
Scientists always find new discoveries in things people question at first.
Who knows, maybe they’ll find more proof towards the big bang. Maybe they’ll find new forms of matter. There is a lot going on during a nuclear explosion and they want to know what all of it is.
It’s going to be used for other stuff too they said, but that was just one of the main highlights. My guess is that by simulating the early part of the nuclear explosion they’ll be able to determine the radius it will cover.
Hi Ryan!
You forgot to mention the “12,960 ‘improved’ Cell processors (yes, like those powering your PS3)” according to Engadget: [engadget.com]
That would be the 6,480 dual-core Opterons that I mentioned. Engadget just counted each core individually, which equals the 12,960 figure they came up with.
I’m not concerned about numbers. I’m talking about CPUs like used in PS3 and nightly “classified” LAN partys… This would be wonderful!
Ahh, gotcha! That would make for a good LAN party.
Wow! A 133M dollar powerful machine! So powerful. I want to have it in my business operation. But oh, my business is just worth a 1,000 dollar. LOL. But can they create that so powerful machine as a movable portable object like a laptop? Lol