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 Engine (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 Opteron™ 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.

Designed also with space and power consumption issues in mind, the system will employ advanced cooling and power management technologies and will occupy only 12,000 square feet of floor space, or approximately the size of three basketball courts.

Roadrunner’s hybrid design will allow the system to segment complex mathematical equations, routing each segment to the part of the system that can most efficiently handle it. Typical compute processes, file IO, and communication activity will be handled by AMD Opteron processors while more complex and repetitive elements -- ones that traditionally consume the majority of supercomputer resources -- will be directed to the more than 16,000 Cell B.E. processors. Designed originally for gaming platforms, where intense graphics and real-time responsiveness are key, the Cell B.E. processor is ideal to speed Roadrunner through intense mathematical problems.

IBM will begin shipping the new supercomputer to the DOE facility at the Los Alamos National Laboratory later this year, with completion of the installation and acceptance anticipated in 2008.

Based on the Power Architecture, the Cell B.E. processor was developed in collaboration with IBM, Sony Corporation, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (Sony and Sony Computer Entertainment collectively referred to as Sony Group), and Toshiba Corporation.