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IBM to Create Hybrid Supercomputer

IBM will build a supercomputer which uses a hybrid approach to handle some of the calculating grunt work. Roadrunner, the new computer, combines a conventional cluster of Opteron servers with Cell chips. Each Cell chip, originally designed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba for the Sony PlayStation 3 video game console, includes eight special-purpose engines that can quickly perform physics calculations.

It was announced by IBM and the Energy Department`s National Nuclear Security Administration that Big Blue had won the contract. LANL`s sister lab, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, currently houses the top-ranked machine, IBM`s Blue Gene/L, which can perform 280 trillion calculations per second, or 280 teraflops. Roadrunner is designed to nearly quadruple that to a sustained speed of 1 quadrillion floating-point operations per second.

Roadrunner, which will run Linux and feature software to juggle tasks between the Opteron and Cell processors, will be built using commercially available IBM hardware. That includes System x3755 servers with four Opteron processors apiece and IBM BladeCenter H servers with Cell-based systems.