Where it is hip to count flops

Last summer the Department of Energy's US$120 million dollar IBM Roadrunner supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory was declared the fastest computer in the world, churning out an incredible 1.026 petaflops, the first system ever to break the petaflops barrier.

The word "flops" is an acronym for Floating Point Operations Per Second, and 1 petaflops represents 1,000 trillion calculations per second. The Roadrunner accomplishment is all the more remarkable given the fastest machine the year before was another IBM supercomputer, BlueGene/L at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which could only process 280 teraflops.

Two other supercomputers, both from Cray (and housed at Oak Ridge and Sandia National Laboratories) barely made it past 100 teraflops. In fact, the raw computational power of Roadrunner is so staggering that it exceeds the combined performance of the top 10 systems from the contest of June 2007.

HPC in the enterprise
The market for High Performance Computing (HPC) has been steadily growing over the last 15 years, increasing by a multiple of 1000 in the last decade alone thanks to vertical (more CPUs and cores) and horizontal (more nodes) scaling.

On the hardware side, HPC is benefiting from the advancements in chip technologies from Intel and AMD (with their multi/many core CPUs). Roadrunner uses about 6,000 dual-core AMD Opteron CPUs, in addition to 12,000 of IBM's proprietary PowerXCell 8i chip.

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