Engineers from IBM are assembling the last components of a product that soon will be, as they hope, the strongest supercomputer in the world – the one which will be capable to work two times faster than the most powerful supercomputer in the present. The last version of the IBM Roadrunner supercomputer is a hybrid one and as its creators say, it will overcome petaflop barrier during the tests next month. Surmounting the petaflop barrier is a goal for many computer producers as Cray Inc., Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics Inc.
The new supercomputer will be used by the Los Alamos National Laboratory of the American Energy Department for working on the problems of national security, making the annual tests for different nuclear arms and forecasting climate changes for long terms. The system will be also used for studying space and human genes.
The new supercomputer will need only a week for making calculations on which the fastest supercomputer ten years ago would have spent 20 years. Jack Dongarra, coauthor of Top 500 of the fastest supercomputers in the world affirms that if Roadrunner turn out to overcome petaflop barrier it will be for the first time when IBM BlueGene system is not the first in this Top 500 since November 2004.
One petaflop represents 1000 trillions of floating point operations (flops) per second. BlueGene works on 478 teraflops that means one trillion operations per second.
All computers from Top 500 list have a teraflop level. Dongarra a distinct professor from the Tennessee University noticed that the time has come to overcome this important barrier in computing. 22 years ago one computer reached a performance of one gigaflop, 11 years ago ASCI Red system was the first that reached one teraflop.
