Roadrunner (supercomputer)
Roadrunner was a supercomputer built by IBM for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA. The US$100-million Roadrunner was designed for a peak performance of 1.7 petaflops. It achieved 1.026 petaflops on May 25, 2008, to become the world's first TOP500 LINPACK sustained 1.0 petaflops system.
| Active | Operational in 2008 Final completion in 2009 |
|---|---|
| Sponsors | IBM |
| Operators | National Nuclear Security Administration |
| Location | Los Alamos National Laboratory |
| Architecture | 12,960 IBM PowerXCell 8i CPUs, 6,480 AMD Opteron dual-core processors, InfiniBand |
| Power | 2.35 MW |
| Operating system | Red Hat Enterprise Linux |
| Space | 296 racks, 560 m2 (6,000 sq ft) |
| Memory | 103.6 TiB |
| Storage | 1,000,000 TiB |
| Speed | 1.042 petaFLOPS |
| Cost | US$100 million (equivalent to $136 million in 2022) |
| Ranking | TOP500: 10, June 2011 |
| Purpose | Modeling the decay of the U.S. nuclear arsenal |
| Legacy | First TOP500 Linpack sustained 1.0 petaflops, May 25, 2008 |
| Website | www |
In November 2008, it reached a top performance of 1.456 petaFLOPS, retaining its top spot in the TOP500 list. It was also the fourth-most energy-efficient supercomputer in the world on the Supermicro Green500 list, with an operational rate of 444.94 megaflops per watt of power used. The hybrid Roadrunner design was then reused for several other energy efficient supercomputers. Roadrunner was decommissioned by Los Alamos on March 31, 2013. In its place, Los Alamos commissioned a supercomputer called Cielo, which was installed in 2010.