If you read this blog a lot you might pick up on a subtle subtext to the things I write about. The obvious nature of my posts points to a general hope that humanity will “get it’s act together”. This is mainly because I can not abide human suffering, and also being a huge science nerd, worry about the future of life on this planet if we mess things up too much (at least human life). But there is a hidden part of me that really yearns for a future filled will fantastic things. Wind powered super computers, environmentally friendly space programs that mine the asteroid belts for raw materials. Hell I would even be happy with solar powered biodegradable cell phones…but I digress. So you might be surprised to hear me say it, but I am all for giant energy sucking computers, especially when they can do amazing things for us.

In 2006, the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration selected Los Alamos National Laboratory as the development site for Roadrunner and IBM as the computer’s designer and builder. Roadrunner, named after the New Mexico state bird (not the cartoon where the poor coyote is constantly squashed with a boulder), cost about $100 million, and was a three-phase project to deliver the world’s first “hybrid” supercomputer – one powerful enough to operate at one petaflop (one thousand trillion calculations per second, or for you keeping count at home REALLY FREAKING FAST). That’s twice as fast as the current No.1 rated IBM Blue Gene system at Lawrence Livermore National Lab – itself nearly three times faster than the leading contenders on the current TOP 500 list of worldwide supercomputers. At this rate we will soon have computers that can run fast enough to simulate the human mind…where we go from there is anyones guess.

Roadrunner will primarily be used to simulate horrible nuclear bomb stuff. But lucky for us people who care about more than blowing people up, the government is going to let some egg heads use it for research into astronomy, energy, human genome science and climate change.

Roadrunner is the world’s first hybrid supercomputer. In a first-of-a-kind design, the Cell Broadband Engine — originally designed for video game platforms such as the Sony Playstation 3 — will work in conjunction with x86 processors from AMD. Thats right, the most powerful computer on earth is basically a bunch of Playstation 3’s hooked up in a fancy way. Never let anyone tell you that video games are not good for anything.

Made from Commercial Parts. In total, Roadrunner connects 6,948 dual-core AMD Opteron chips (on IBM Model LS21 blade servers) as well as 12,960 Cell engines (on IBM Model QS22 blade servers). The Roadrunner system has 80 terabytes of memory, (to give you an idea that would be 4,000,000 trees worth of printed paper date, the entire Library Of Congress fits into 10 terabytes) and is housed in 288 refrigerator-sized, IBM BladeCenter racks occupying 6,000 square feet. Its 10,000 connections – both Infiniband and Gigabit Ethernet — require 57 miles of fiber optic cable. Roadrunner weighs 500,000 lbs. Thats a lot of computer, and I bet it uses a LOT of energy to run. So how can I think this is a good thing? Well mostly because I think giant computers are a worthy use of energy, and giant SUV’s are not. I am not against using energy, I am just against wasting it. Having giant super computers can lead to breakthroughs in climate modeling, medicine, science and a whole host of other positive human endevors. Driving a hummer 2 miles to the store to pick up one thing and then driving back just wasts gas, and in no way benefits the human race.

The geek fest continues, with Roadrunner’s unique configuration. Two IBM QS22 blade servers and one IBM LS21 blade server are combined into a specialized “tri-blade” configuration for Roadrunner. The machine is composed of a total of 3,456 tri-blades built in IBM’s Rochester, Minn. plant. Standard processing (e.g., file system I/O) is handled by the Opteron processors. Mathematically and CPU-intensive elements are directed to the Cell processors. Each tri-blade unit can run at 400 billion operations per second (400 Gigaflops).

The machine was built, tested and benchmarked in IBM’s Poughkeepsie, N.Y. plant, home of the ASCI series of supercomputers the company built for the US government in the late 1990s. IBM’s site in Rochester, Minn. constructed the specialized tri-blade servers. Software development was led by IBM engineers in Austin, Texas and by researchers in IBM’s Yorktown Heights, N.Y. research lab. Roadrunner will be loaded onto 21 tractor trailer trucks later this summer when it is delivered to Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico. Not only is this thing AWESOMELY fast, Roadrunner operates on open-source Linux software from Red Hat.

Compared to most traditional supercomputer designs, Roadrunner’s hybrid format sips power ( it still uses 3.9 megawatts which would be the output of 1-3 large commercial wind turbines) and delivers world-leading efficiency – 376 million calculations per watt. So even though it uses a lot of juice, it is getting better efficiency per watt that that computer sitting in front of you right now. IBM expects Roadrunner to place among the top energy-efficient systems later in June when the official “Green 500” list of supercomputers is issued.

IBM is developing new software to make Cell-powered hybrid computing broadly accessible. Roadrunner’s massive software effort targets commercial applications for hybrid supercomputing. With corporate and academic partners, IBM is developing an open-source ecosystem that will bring hybrid supercomputing to financial services, energy exploration and medical imaging industries among others. Soon we could have a network of hybrid super computers doing all sorts of great things for science and humanity. Developing new solar panels, more efficient wind turbine blades, better climate models, newer forms of battery storage for our electric cars, the sky is really the limit.

How fast is a petaflop? Roadrunner operates at speeds exceeding one petaflop — one thousand trillion calculations per second — or one million billion calculations per second; or one quadrillion calculations per second. That’s roughly equivalent to the combined computing power of 100,000 of today’s fastest laptop computers. You would need a stack of laptops 1.5 miles high to equal Roadrunner’s performance. It would take the entire population of the earth, — about six billion – each of us working a handheld calculator at the rate of one second per calculation, more than 46 years to do what Roadrunner can do in one day. So how fast is a petaflop, fast…

In the past 10 years, supercomputer power has increased about 1,000 times. Today, just three of Roadrunner’s 3,456 Tri-blade units have the same power as the 1998 fastest computer. A complex physics calculation that will take Roadrunner one week to complete, would have taken the 1998 machine 20 years to finish – it would be half done today! If it were possible for cars to improve their gas mileage over the past decade at the same rate that supercomputers have improved their cost and efficiency, we’d be getting 200,000 miles to the gallon today.

I for one welcome our new energy efficient super computer overlords. Now if we can just get IBM and the rest of them computer nerds to build a giant wind farm/solar array for every one of these things they build we would be all set.