Sunday, March 31, 2013

Energy inefficiency brings an end to 2008's record-breaking Roadrunner supercomputer


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The fastest supercomputer of 2008 is being decommissioned today after setting record-breaking speeds five years ago. The IBM-built Roadrunner was the first machine to reach the notable performance target of 1 sustained petaflops — equivalent to one million billion calculations per second. Though the machine is still one of the faster computers in the world, its power consumption is making it obsolete. The next-fastest supercomputer nearly matches Roadrunner's speeds with only about one-fifth of the energy consumption, making Roadrunner comparably too expensive to operate.

Los Alamos National Laboratory, the institution that houses Roadrunner, noted in a statement that future supercomputers will need a focus on power efficiency so that...

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via The Verge - All Posts http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/31/4167806/roadrunner-record-breaking-supercomputer-decommissioned-over-energy-inefficiency http://www.theverge.com/