Roadrunner from IBM

Take a look at the Top500 Supercomputer Sites List (http://www.top500.org/) which shows that a large portion of the technical computing has moved to Linux clusters: commodity servers, commodity networks and commodity storage. At the same time, novel multi-core processor architectures, such as the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE), show the potential for substantial computing power (hundreds of gigaflops) to reside in entry-level servers, with, say, two to four processors.

On the other hand, IDC's Earl Joseph concluded in a study on technical computing software that "many ISV codes today scale only to 32 processors, and some of the most important ones for industry don't scale beyond four processors" (http://www.hpcwire.com/hpc/430360.html).

His study also found that even when a vendor has a strategy to parallelize or scale its code, the cost of re-architecting and recoding is too high relative to the perceived market benefits.

To address this, IBM is creating a supercomputer, called Roadrunner, designed to be the based on the Cell BE. It is projected to be completed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2008, and will be capable of peak performance of more than 1.6 peta-flops, or 1.6 thousand trillion calculations/s.

Roadrunner is using a hybrid computing architecture: multiple heterogeneous cores with a multi-tier memory hierarchy. It's built entirely out of commodity parts: AMD Opteron-based servers, Cell BE-based accelerators and Infiniband interconnect. Standard processing (e.g., file system I/O) will be handled by Opteron processors, while more mathematically and CPU-intensive elements will be directed to the Cell BE processors.

The software philosophy is a "division of labor" approach. There will continue to be a set of computational kernel developers maximizing performance out of the microprocessor ISA; in fact, many such kernels already exist (matrix multiply is a good example). Library developers will use frameworks such as the one developed for Roadrunner to synthesize the kernels into multi-core, memory hierarchy libraries. Application developers will then link in those libraries using standard compiler and linker technology. Consistent APIs and methodology across a number of mutli-core architectures without the introduction of new languages will limit the cost of code maintenance. Thus, library developers get improved ease of use not just for accelerator systems but also for general-purpose multi-core approaches and clusters.

IBM is inviting industry partners to define the components (APIs, tools, etc.) of the programming methodology so that the multi-core systems are accessible to those partners as well. Potential uses include:

• Financial services. By calculating cause and effect in capital markets in real-time, supercomputers can instantly predict the ripple effect of a stock market change throughout the markets.
• Digital animation. Massive supercomputing power will let movie makers create characters and scenarios so realistic that the line will be blurred between animated and live-action movies.
• Information-based medicine. Complex 3-D renderings of tissues and bone structures will happen in real-time, with in-line analytics used for tumor detection as well as comparison with historical data and real-time patient data. Synthesis of real-time patient data can be used to generate predictive alerts.
• Oil and gas production. Supercomputers are used to map out underground geographies, simulate reservoirs and analyze the data acquired visually by scientists in the field.
• Nanotechnology. Supercomputing is expected to advance the science of building devices, such as electronic circuits, from single atoms and molecules.
• Protein folding. Supercomputers can be used to provide an understanding of how diseases come about, how to test for them and how therapies and cures might be developed.

More information @ www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/20210.wss