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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."
It used a combo of cell CPUs and AMD Opterons so if they want to recoup some of the cost i doubt selling those chips would be hard.
Of course this is one more reason i don't like the "game console" way the industry is being pushed, with Intel talking about soldering boards to chips and companies pushing more "black box" computing because if it were not for bog standard yet powerful COTS parts things like Roadrunner would be either impossible or insanely expensive. Yet to hear the industry pundits tell it all we need is a tablet and an iPhone...sheesh. Give me a system I can upgrade any day of the week, the laptops and tablet are fine for service calls or as PMPs but they will always be more about style and battery life than performance.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It costs a _lot_ to keep these computers running (read Millions with a really big M). The power bill alone is an enormous amount of money.
It literally gets to the point where it is cheaper to tear it down and build a new one that is better in flops / Watt than to keep the current one running.