IBM’s Roadrunner supercomputer broke the 1 petaflop barrier during the 2008 financial crisis

Welcome to The Drive, a weekly column looking at some wacky, interesting, cool, and pivotal things within the tech space! Curated by PC Hardware Lead Editor Richard Edmonds through almost two decades covering the sector. Think something should be covered? Hit me up at rich.e@valnetinc.net!

2008 wasn’t a particularly great year. The world was still wrapped in the financial crisis. Banks were struggling to stay afloat, homeonwers were defaulting on mortgages. Things were bleak but there were positive stories that allowed us to excape reality for a moment or two. One was IMB and its Roadrunner supercomputer. Built for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2008, it broke records by achieving 1.7 petaflops, which translates to 1,000,000,000,000,000 floating point perations per second (flops). Flops is a useful measurement of computing power for scientific computations and IBM was first to cross this barrier.

What was the IBM Roadrunner?

IBM was tasked by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), part of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Inside was 12,960 IBM PowerXCell 8i and 6,480 AMD Opteron dual-core processors. This Roadrunner supercomputer is aplty named with more than 19,000 CPUs. We’ve covered many of the best desktop and lapto-class processors here at XDA but even I struggle to comprehend just how much computing power was available with this machine in the late 00s. These chips powered specifically designed blade servers running Red Hat Enterprise and Fedora.

So just how big was Roadrunner? The entire supercomputer, connected by InfiniBand, occupied 296 server racks. Tis hybrid approach required all software to be written specifically for this architecture, which saw an IBM-designed PowerXCell 8i attached to each AMD Opteron core. Development started in 2002 and went online sometime in 2006. Three deployment stages were required to get the entire unit up and running by 2008. The AMD Opteron 2210 CPU ran at 1.8GHz and handled general system operations and communications. The IBM PowerXCell 8i acted as accelerators with eight special cores for floating point operations.

The Roadrunner cluster consisted of 18 connected units, each interconnected with eight Infiniband ISR2012 switches. Power draw hit a colossal 2.345 MW, which seems almost insignificant to the Global requirements of cryptocurrency and AI development. The supercomputer was commissioned for the Department of Enerbgy to simultate how nuclear materials age in order to predict whether the government’s stockpile of weapons are safe and reliable for use. The system was also tasked for science, financial, automotive, and aerospacial duties.

Why was this 1 petaflop record important?

IBM’s Roadrunner was the first machine capable of sustaining 1 peraflop per second, but what was the big deal? Roadreunner paved the way for even faster supercomputers to facilitate research in science, industry, society, and other verticals. Such systems are used today in the designing of aircraft and battery systems, things we all use and rely on. Enjoyed the exceptional visual effects in The Lord of The Rings and Dune? This was all possible thanks to petascale machines. Another IBM supercomputer called Summit, was unveiled in 2018 and has been used to study earthquakes and supernovae.

But we’re not stopping there as exascale computing is on the horizon, which is 1,000 times faster than petaflop-class systems. IBM was one of six awarded a contract with the DOE to create the first exascale supercomputer. Codenamed Aurora, this machine is scheduled to be dployed at the Argonne National Laboratory. According to IBM, “Exascale machines hold the potential to hasten the pace of discovery in highly complex areas that have long been beyond the reach of computers — from hurricane prediction and long-term climate modeling to tools development for fusion energy, medicine and materials. Aurora is intended to focus on investigating low-carbon technologies, subatomic particle behavior, cancer therapies and more-efficient solar cells.”

An exaflop is pretty fast but still has nowhere near as many zeros as Russia’s Google fine.