First Petaflop Supercomputer To Shut Down

An anonymous reader writes "In 2008 Roadrunner was the world's fastest supercomputer. Now that the first system to break the petaflop barrier has lost a step on today's leaders it will be shut down and dismantled. In its five years of operation, the Roadrunner was the 'workhorse' behind the National Nuclear Security Administration's Advanced Simulation and Computing program, providing key computer simulations for the Stockpile Stewardship Program."

Comments

throw away mentality (actual arcticle link)

[Nyder]

I guess it's not new and shiny anymore, so we can just throw it away.

I did want to read the actual article, but the only link is to a 2008 article.

Fail or what?

http://news.sky.com/story/1071902/supercomputer-pioneer-roadrunner-to-shut-down

That is the article. And i see why they are getting rid of it, not as power efficient as new computers.

Re:throw away mentality (actual arcticle link)

[Nemyst]

The manufacturers give themselves a lot of headroom. The last thing they want is for you to start whining at them because the PSU you've bought isn't powerful enough.

Keep in mind that unlike laptops, the motherboard manufacturer's got no idea of what you'll be pairing the board with. A low-end, cheap PSU at terrible efficiency may be "rated" at 200W but only give out 100W before crapping out. They also give themselves headroom for people who think the motherboard's rated power requirements also include everything else (ie. RAM, CPU, hard drives, etc.).

Actual power usage is far, far below the recommended power output. My computer's sitting idle at a little above 200W, and that's an i5-2500K overclocked with 16GB of RAM, two Radeon HD6950 2GB GPUs, two 7500RPM 3.5" HDDs plus a Vertex 3 SSD, an optical drive, a mouse, a mechanical keyboard requiring double USB ports, a phone recharging, an external eSATA HDD, all running on a full ATX motherboard geared towards power and not efficiency. Oh, and the reading includes two 23" IPS screens with non-LED backlighting (so much more power hungry).

If I remember well, full load (prime95 torture test and furmark running at the same time) topped at around 550W, again with a bunch of peripherals plugged in, a 1GHz overclock above normal, and 2 screens counted in the total. I'd say that that kind of power is very much in line with your laptop, considering just how ridiculously more powerful it is.

Re:Top supercomputer is Google?

[friedmud]

I've worked for the DOE for quite a few years now writing software for these supercomputers... and I can guarantee you that we use the hell out of them. There is usually quite a wait to just run a job on them.

They are used for national security, energy, environment, biology and a lot more.

If you want to see some of what we do with them see this video (it's me talking):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-2VfET8SNw

Re:The Coyote finally won

[metlin]

Yeah, just like the OP who was too busy "pecking" and forgot to include the link to the actual article on the decommissioning: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2417271,00.asp

Re:A pellet stress simulation?

[friedmud]

I don't get it are you looking for a Funny mod? You linked to a 2D heat transfer simulation done by Matlab. Did you even watch the video?

The second simulation (of a full nuclear fuel rod in 3D) was nearly 300 million degrees of freedom and the output alone was nearly 400GB to postprocess. It involves around 15 fully coupled, nonlinear PDEs all being solved simultaneously and fully implicitly (to model multiple years of a complex process you have to be able to take big timesteps) on ~12,000 processors.

Matlab isn't even close.

Re:Whiners

[Macman408]

The problem is energy efficiency. In the past 5 years since it was first built, supercomputers have become far more energy-efficient. Roadrunner falls at 444 MFLOPS per Watt, while the current fastest supercomputer (and also a DOE project), Titan, is 2,143 MFLOPS per Watt. Roadrunner uses 2345 kW, and supporting equipment (cooling, backup power adds (on average) 80% more. Assume they get relatively cheap electricity (The Internets tell me the average price charged to industrial customers is 7/kWh), and that means that their electric bill is at least $295.50 PER HOUR. A computer with the same performance but Titan's efficiency would cost $61 per hour. That's the difference between your electric bill being $2.6 million per year and $500,000.

Assuming Titan's cost also scales ($60 million for 17 Petaflops -> ~$3.5 million for 1 Petaflop), then the payback for scrapping it and building a new computer is under 2 years. So yes, it IS saving money to scrap this one. They're not even replacing it with a new one (yet, anyway) - they're using one that was built in 2010.

And also, yes, you CAN use a computer to calculate how your nuclear arsenal is deteriorating. What makes you think they can't?

"Atomic" clocks don't use radioactive decay....

[Ellis D. Tripp]

They rely on the resonant frequency of atoms in metal vapors (Cesium or Rubidium), or the output of a hydrogen maser.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_clock

Radioactive decay is a chaotic process. So chaotic that it can be used as the basis for a random number generator. Just what you DON'T want in a precise time/frequency reference.

http://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/

Re:Mod suppression aside, the point is clear

[cnaumann]

Atomic clocks have absolutely nothing to do with radioactive decay. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_clock