IBM to Build World’s First Cell Broadband Engine Based Supercomputer

IBM to Build World’s First Cell Broadband Engine Based Supercomputer

The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has selected IBM to design and build the world’s first supercomputer to harness the immense power of the Cell Broadband Engineâ„¢ (Cell B.E.) processor aiming to produce a machine capable of a sustained speed of up to 1,000 trillion calculations per second, or one petaflop.

The ‘hybrid’ supercomputer, codenamed Roadrunner, will be installed at DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory. In a first-of-a-kind design, Cell B.E. chips — originally designed for video game platforms — will work in conjunction with systems based on x86 processors from Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD).

Designed specifically to handle a broad spectrum of scientific and commercial applications, the supercomputer design will include new, highly sophisticated software to orchestrate over 16,000 AMD Opteronâ„¢ processor cores and over 16,000 Cell B.E. processors in tackling some of the most challenging problems in computing today. The revolutionary supercomputer will be capable of a peak performance of over 1.6 petaflops (or 1.6 thousand trillion calculations per second).

The machine is to be built entirely from commercially available hardware and based on the Linux® operating system. IBM® System x™ 3755 servers based on AMD Opteron technology will be deployed in conjunction with IBM BladeCenter® H systems with Cell B.E. technology. Each system used is designed specifically for high performance implementations.

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