It's A Bird, It's A Plane -- It's IBM's Roadrunner, World's Fastest Supercomputer

supercomputer operating systems

According to the 33rd edition of the TOP500 Supercomputing Sites of the world's most powerful supercomputers, IBM's Roadrunner system at the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory holds onto the No. 1 spot, coming in at 1.105 petaflop/s. One petaflop/s is 1,000 trillion operations per second. According to the Los Alamos Web site, "To put this into perspective, if each of the 6 billion people on earth had a hand calculator and worked together on a calculation 24 hours per day, 365 days a year, it would take 46 years to do what Roadrunner would do in one day."

Roadrunner comprises 12,960 IBM PowerXCell 8i CPUs combined with 6,480 AMD Opteron dual-core processors. Roadrunner uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora as its operating systems. Last June, Roadrunner became the first system to break the petaflop/s Linpack barrier, the High Performance Computing Community's most prominent benchmark, which is used to measure and compare systems' relative performance.

However, an increasing number of systems -- 79.8 percent -- use Intel processors. Intel provides the processors for the largest share of TOP500 systems.

The Cray XT5 Jaguar system installed at the DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory continues to rank second. Jaguar reached 1.059 petaflop/s shortly after its installation, but because of its heavy workload no further measurements were possible.

Seven of the top 10 systems on the newest TOP500 list are located at DOE facilities, with nine of those 10 located within the United States. The most powerful system outside the United States is the Chinese-built Dawning 5000A at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center. It is the largest system that runs on the Windows HPC 2008 operating system.

The TOP500 list is updated twice a year and generally is volatile. For example, the last system on the newest list would have been listed at position 274 in the previous TOP500 a mere six months ago.