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IBM and AMD feed on Los Alamos' ample supercomputing pork
Opteron and Cell fuel 'Roadrunner'
By Ashlee Vance in Mountain View
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) will turn to both AMD's Opteron chip and IBM's Cell in an effort to breath new life into its supercomputing program.
Companies have been bidding for months, hoping to win LANL's "Roadrunner" supercomputer contract. The system, which will be built over the next year, should end up as one of the fastest - if not the fastest - machine on the planet. And it now looks like IBM will take the majority of the bragging rights for constructing the monster.
The lab will announce that IBM will build Roadrunner using a hybrid design that makes use of Opteron and Cell systems, according to a report from online rag CNET. The publication cites "sources familiar with the machine" as claiming that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which oversees LANL, will reveal IBM's win "in the coming days."
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"It is expected to run scientific calculations of highly complex phenomena that are 10 times as detailed as any existing computer," LANL said back in May. "It also will establish Los Alamos as the leading contender to win the worldwide race to have the first supercomputer able to run at a sustained performance level of 1 petaflop, or a billion million computations per second."
Opteron and Cell fuel 'Roadrunner'
By Ashlee Vance in Mountain View
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) will turn to both AMD's Opteron chip and IBM's Cell in an effort to breath new life into its supercomputing program.
Companies have been bidding for months, hoping to win LANL's "Roadrunner" supercomputer contract. The system, which will be built over the next year, should end up as one of the fastest - if not the fastest - machine on the planet. And it now looks like IBM will take the majority of the bragging rights for constructing the monster.
The lab will announce that IBM will build Roadrunner using a hybrid design that makes use of Opteron and Cell systems, according to a report from online rag CNET. The publication cites "sources familiar with the machine" as claiming that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which oversees LANL, will reveal IBM's win "in the coming days."
>
>
"It is expected to run scientific calculations of highly complex phenomena that are 10 times as detailed as any existing computer," LANL said back in May. "It also will establish Los Alamos as the leading contender to win the worldwide race to have the first supercomputer able to run at a sustained performance level of 1 petaflop, or a billion million computations per second."
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