Plan B Forum

A US supercomputer called Roadrunner has been switched off by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

The machine was the first to operate at "petaflop pace" - the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second - when it launched in 2008.



It has been used to model viruses and distant parts of the universe, as well as in nuclear weapons research.

It remains one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, but has been replaced by something even faster.

"Roadrunner got everyone thinking in new ways about how to build and use a supercomputer,'' said Gary Grider, from the Los Alamos National Laboratory high performance computing division, in a statement.

"Specialised processors are being included in new ways on new systems and being used in novel ways. Our demonstration with Roadrunner caused everyone to pay attention.''

Its replacement, the Cielo, has been used by the weapons research lab since 2010. [typical]While Roadrunner cost $121m (£79m) to develop, Cielo cost $54m (£35m) and is a faster operator, according to the lab.

Roadrunner was developed by computer giant IBM.

The huge machine includes 12,000 modified versions of the processor originally designed for the Sony Playstation 3, and 92km (57 miles) of fibre optic cable, housed in 288 refrigerator-sized cases.

It was shut down on Sunday 31 March and will be dismantled this month after some experiments are carried out on its operating system, said the laboratory.

"Even in death, we are trying to learn from Roadrunner," said Mr Grider.

China has built the world's fastest supercomputer, almost twice as fast as the previous US record holder and underlining the country's rise as a science and technology powerhouse.



The Tianhe-2, developed by the National University of Defence Technology in central China's Changsha city, is capable of sustained computing of 33.86 petaflops per second, according to the semi-annual TOP500 official listing of the world's fastest supercomputers. That's the equivalent of 33,860 trillion calculations per second.

The computer uses a total of 3.12 million processor cores, using Intel's Ivy Bridge and Xeon Phi chips to perform calculations.

The Tianhe-2, which means Milky Way-2, knocks the US Department of Energy's Titan machine off the no. 1 spot. That machine achieved 17.59 petaflops per second.

Supercomputers are used for complex work such as modelling weather systems, simulating nuclear explosions and designing jet planes.

It's the second time China has been named as having built the world's fastest supercomputer. In November 2010, the Tianhe-2's predecessor, Tianhe-1A, had that honour before Japan's K computer overtook it a few months later.

The Tianhe-2's achievement shows how China is leveraging rapid economic growth and sharp increases in research spending to join the US, Europe and Japan in the global technology elite.

"Most of the features of the system were developed in China, and they are only using Intel for the main compute part," said TOP500 editor Jack Dongarra. "That is, the interconnect, operating system, front-end processors and software are mainly Chinese," said Dongarra, who toured the Tianhe-2 development facility in May.



Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/comp ... z2WXU06Nm4

they are only using Intel for the main compute part