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26-670: Blue Waters was a petascale supercomputer operated by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . On August 8, 2007, the National Science Board approved a resolution which authorized the National Science Foundation to fund "the acquisition and deployment of the world's most powerful leadership-class supercomputer." The NSF awarded $ 208 million for

52-449: A 20,000-square-foot (1,900 m) machine room. The facility has been certified LEED Gold. The facility makes use of the university's campus-wide water cooling system and additional on-site cooling towers that take advantage of the low temperatures in Illinois during the winter months to help reduce energy consumption. The building was designed using complex fluid dynamic models to optimize

78-796: A performance of 1.759 petaFLOPS after a 2009 update. In 2020, Fugaku became the fastest supercomputer in the world, reaching 415 petaFLOPS in June 2020. Fugaku later achieved an Rmax of 442 petaFLOPS in November of the same year. By 2022, exascale computing had been reached with the development of Frontier , surpassing Fugaku with an Rmax of 1.102 exaFLOPS in June 2022. Modern artificial intelligence (AI) systems require large amounts of computational power to train model parameters. OpenAI employed 25,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs to train GPT-4 , using 133 trillion floating point operations. IBM Roadrunner Roadrunner

104-495: A significant leap from traditional supercomputers in terms of raw performance, enabling them to handle vast datasets and complex computations. Floating point operations per second (FLOPS) are one measure of computer performance . FLOPS can be recorded in different measures of precision, however the standard measure (used by the TOP500 supercomputer list) uses 64 bit ( double-precision floating-point format ) operations per second using

130-433: A total of 12,960 PowerXCell processors, with 12,960 PPE cores and 103,680 SPE cores, for a total of 116,640 cores. Logically, a TriBlade consists of two dual-core Opterons with 16 GB RAM and four PowerXCell 8i CPUs with 16 GB Cell RAM. Physically, a TriBlade consists of one LS21 Opteron blade , an expansion blade, and two QS22 Cell blades. The LS21 has two 1.8 GHz dual-core Opterons with 16 GB memory for

156-410: Is connected through twelve uplinks for each second-stage switch, which makes a total of 96 uplink connections. Overall system information: IBM Roadrunner was shut down on March 31, 2013. While the supercomputer was one of the fastest in the world, its energy efficiency was relatively low. Roadrunner delivered 444 megaflops per watt vs the 886 megaflops per watt of a comparable supercomputer. Before

182-583: Is connected to the Opteron blade via HyperTransport. A Connected Unit is 60 BladeCenter H full of TriBlades, that is 180 TriBlades. All TriBlades are connected to a 288-port Voltaire ISR2012 Infiniband switch. Each CU also has access to the Panasas file system through twelve System x3755 servers. CU system information: The final cluster is made up of 18 connected units, which are connected via eight additional (second-stage) Infiniband ISR2012 switches. Each CU

208-487: Is the common standard for performance measurement. The petaFLOPS barrier was first broken on 16 September 2007 by the distributed computing Folding@home project. The first single petascale system, the Roadrunner , entered operation in 2008. The Roadrunner , built by IBM , had a sustained performance of 1.026 petaFLOPS. The Jaguar became the second computer to break the petaFLOPS milestone, later in 2008, and reached

234-591: The High Performance LINPACK (HPLinpack) benchmark . The metric typically refers to single computing systems, although can be used to measure distributed computing systems for comparison. It can be noted that there are alternative precision measures using the LINPACK benchmarks which are not part of the standard metric/definition. It has been recognized that HPLinpack may not be a good general measure of supercomputer utility in real world application, however it

260-492: 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

286-619: The 1 petaflops barrier during its fourth attempt on May 25, 2008. The complete system was moved to its permanent location in New Mexico in the summer of 2008. Roadrunner used two different models of processors. The first is the AMD Opteron 2210 , running at 1.8 GHz. Opterons are used both in the computational nodes feeding the Cells with useful data and in the system operations and communication nodes passing data between computing nodes and helping

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312-480: The Blue Waters project. On August 8, 2011, NCSA announced that IBM had terminated its contract to provide hardware for the project, and would refund payments to date. Cray Inc. then was awarded a $ 188 million contract with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to build the supercomputer for the Blue Waters project; the supercomputer was installed in phases in 2012. It operated until December 31, 2021, and

338-623: The Cell processor. This phase was used to build prototype applications for the hybrid architecture. It went online in January 2007. The goal of Phase 3 was to reach sustained performance in excess of 1 petaflops. Additional Opteron nodes and new PowerXCell processors were added to the design. These PowerXCell processors are five times as powerful as the Cell processors used in Phase 2. It was built to full scale at IBM’s Poughkeepsie, New York facility, where it broke

364-474: The Roadrunner was building a standard Opteron based cluster, while evaluating the feasibility to further construct and program the future hybrid version. This Phase 1 Roadrunner reached 71 teraflops and was in full operation at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2006. Phase 2 known as AAIS (Advanced Architecture Initial System) included building a small hybrid version of the finished system using an older version of

390-515: The USA's aging arsenal of nuclear weapons are both safe and reliable. Other uses for the Roadrunner included the science, financial, automotive, and aerospace industries. Roadrunner differed from other contemporary supercomputers because it continued the hybrid approach to supercomputer design introduced by Seymour Cray in 1964 with the Control Data Corporation CDC 6600 and continued with

416-411: The cooling system. Energy efficiency at the data center is estimated to be in the 85–90% range, far superior to the 40% efficiency typically seen in large data centers. Petascale Petascale computing refers to computing systems capable of performing at least 1 quadrillion (10^15) floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) . These systems are often called petaflops systems and represent

442-533: The operators running the system. Roadrunner has a total of 6,912 Opteron processors with 6,480 used for computation and 432 for operation. The Opterons are connected together by HyperTransport links. Each Opteron has two cores for a total 13,824 cores. The second processor is the IBM PowerXCell 8i , running at 3.2 GHz. These processors have one general purpose core (PPE), and eight special performance cores (SPE) for floating point operations. Roadrunner has

468-554: The order of magnitude faster CDC 7600 in 1969. However, in this architecture the peripheral processors were used only for operating system functions and all applications ran in the one central processor. Most previous supercomputers had only used one processor architecture, since it was thought to be easier to design and program for. To realize the full potential of Roadrunner, all software had to be written specially for this hybrid architecture. The hybrid design consisted of dual-core Opteron server processors manufactured by AMD using

494-474: The standard AMD64 architecture . Attached to each Opteron core is an IBM-designed and -fabricated PowerXCell 8i processor. As a supercomputer, the Roadrunner was considered an Opteron cluster with Cell accelerators, as each node consists of a Cell attached to an Opteron core and the Opterons to each other. Roadrunner was in development from 2002 and went online in 2006. Due to its novel design and complexity it

520-517: The whole blade, providing 8GB for each CPU. Each QS22 has two PowerXCell 8i CPUs, running at 3.2 GHz and 8 GB memory, which makes 4 GB for each CPU. The expansion blade connects the two QS22 via four PCIe x8 links to the LS21, two links for each QS22. It also provides outside connectivity via an InfiniBand 4x DDR adapter. This makes a total width of four slots for a single TriBlade. Three TriBlades fit into one BladeCenter H chassis. The expansion blade

546-479: 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. In November 2008, it reached a top performance of 1.456 petaFLOPS , retaining its top spot in

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572-446: Was connected with 300 Gbit/s wide area links. A machine the scale of Blue Waters introduces special concerns with regards to cooling and power. A new National Petascale Computing Facility was built at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign at the corner of Oak Street and St. Mary's Road. This facility houses Blue Waters and other NCSA computing, networking, and data systems. The 88,000-square-foot (8,200 m) building has

598-416: Was constructed in three phases and became fully operational in 2008. Its predecessor was a machine also developed at Los Alamos named Dark Horse. This machine was one of the earliest hybrid architecture systems originally based on ARM and then moved to the Cell processor. It was entirely a 3D design, its design integrated 3D memory, networking, processors and a number of other technologies. The first phase of

624-407: Was installed in 2010. IBM built the computer for the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). It was a hybrid design with 12,960 IBM PowerXCell 8i and 6,480 AMD Opteron dual-core processors in specially designed blade servers connected by InfiniBand . The Roadrunner used Red Hat Enterprise Linux along with Fedora as its operating systems, and

650-481: Was managed with xCAT distributed computing software. It also used the Open MPI Message Passing Interface implementation. Roadrunner occupied approximately 296 server racks which covered 560 square metres (6,000 sq ft) and became operational in 2008. It was decommissioned March 31, 2013. The DOE used the computer for simulating how nuclear materials age in order to predict whether

676-548: Was replaced by the Delta project in April 2022. Blue Waters ran science and engineering codes at sustained speeds of at least one petaFLOPS . It had more than 1.5  PB of memory, more than 25  PB of disk storage, and up to 500  PB of tape storage. The storage filesystem was the Cray Lustre parallel file system, which is capable of terabyte-per-second storage bandwidth. It

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