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Supercomputer to Hit 1.6 Petaflops With 16,000 Cell Chips

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the you-do-the-math dept.

tygerstripes writes, "IBM has announced that they are gearing up to build the world's fastest supercomputer, more than four times faster than the reigning champ, IBM's BlueGene/L. Nicknamed 'Roadrunner,' the new machine will be a hybrid of off-the-shelf CPUs and Cell chips designed for the PS3. Roadrunner is to be installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, occupying 1,100 square metres of floorspace (that's a square about 110 feet on a side). According to the BBC: 'The computer will contain 16,000 standard processors working alongside 16,000 Cell processors... each Cell is capable of 256 billion calculations per second.'"

2 of 260 comments (clear)

  1. So the price was by CrazyJim1 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    16,000 *600$= 9.6 million. That doesn't seem like much for the biggest super computer.

    --
    God spoke to me.
  2. Re:Flops? CPS? by adam31 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The flop, of course, came from floating point operation. Even then it's vague--is it single, double or double-extended?

    I was thinking the same thing. Running the numbers, 256 GFlop * 16,000 => 4.096 PFlop @ single precision. So if IBM means SP flops, something is slowing its theoretical max down by 2.5x. But Cell's DP perf yields 18.2 * 16,000 => .292 PFlop @ DP. So that's not it either.

    It's long been rumored that a post-PS3 Cell is in development that can pipeline DP flops. Its max theoretical DP perf would still be half of SP because it's just 2 DP values per 128-bit register instead of 4. AND, if you figure they lower the GHz to 3.2 to cut the heat output in half, you arrive at the magical number... 1.638 PFlop.

    So can we take this as evidence that there now exists a Cell that performs DP calculations pipelined?