Fastest Computer On Earth

Posted by Codrut Nistor
June 10, 2008, filled under News


"Fastest computer on earth" is a very interesting topic, because every time I think that fastest computer available on this planet about two decades ago was slower than my desktop computer I have now I get chills down my spine. The most interesting part is that after I found out about the new supercomputer holding the crown, I got some serious chills, because I don't know if I'll ever have that amount of processing power on my desk, and I am not planning to leave this world anytime soon. Now, let's leave my thoughts aside and see some of the technical specifications of the fastest computer on earth, shall we?

IBM Roadrunner

Pictured above, the IBM Roadrunner is currently the fastest computer on earth, and it got this label earlier this week, when it reached the performance level it was designed for, exactly 1.026 petaflops! This computer was built for the US Department of Energy, and it consists of almost 6,500 AMD Opteron dual core processors and almost 13,000 IBM PowerXCell 8i CPUs, all packed in TriBlades that are connected by Infiniband.

Using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS, the Roadrunner covers almost 12,000 square feet (1,100 square meters), and each of the TriBlades I mentioned above has four Opteron cores, four PowerXCell 8i CPUs, 16 GB Opteron and 16 GB Cell RAM. Not that impressive, after all... but if we go up, we'll end up with the final cluster, having the following configuration:

- 6,480 dual-core Opterons with 51.8 TB RAM (in 3,240 LS21 blades)
- 12,960 Cell cores with 51.8 TB RAM (in 6,480 QS22 blades)
- 216 System x3655 I/O nodes
- 26 288-port ISR2012 Infiniband 4x DDR switches
- 296 racks

Say whaaat? Now, that's what I can really call a supercomputer! In fact, it's the fastest computer on earth, so this is the ultimate computing machine, not "just another IBM mainframe."

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Comments

Comment by Robbie on June 10, 2008 @ 4:58 pm

Nice, how is that compared to the human brain? Power, speed and the right software…Nice…

Comment by gerson on June 27, 2008 @ 10:42 am

Where is this SUPER-coputer located? What applications use this computer?

As you had said really, i found the computer on my desktop is quite adequate.

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