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IBM Roadrunner retires from the supercomputer race
For all the money and effort poured into supercomputers, their lifespans can be brutally short. See IBM's Roadrunner as a textbook example: the 116,640-core cluster was smashing records just five years ago, and yet it's already considered so behind the times that Los Alamos National Laboratory is taking it out of action today. Don't mourn too much for the one-time legend, however. The blend of Opteron and Cell processors proved instrumental to understanding energy flow in weapons while also advancing the studies of HIV, nanowires and the known universe. Roadrunner should even be useful in its last gasps, as researchers will have a month to experiment with the system's data routing and OS memory compression before it's dismantled in earnest. It's true that the supercomputer has been eclipsed by cheaper, faster or greener competitors, including its reborn Cray arch-nemesis -- but there's no question that we'll have learned from Roadrunner's brief moment in the spotlight.
AMD unveils Open 3.0: an Opteron 6300 platform for the Open Compute Project
The Open Compute Project is pushing hard for servers that are both very scalable and streamlined, and AMD is more than willing to help with the launch of its Open 3.0 server platform. The framework combines two Opteron 6300 processors with a motherboard that contains just the essentials, yet scales to meet just about any need in a rackmount system. Among the many, many expansion options are 24 memory slots, six SATA ports for storage, as many as four PCI Express slots and a mezzanine link for custom components. Open 3.0 isn't as flexible as a decentralized, Intel-based prototype being shown at the same time, but it's also much closer to practical reality -- a handful of companies already have access, and on-the-ground sales should start before the end of March. If all goes well, companies will have a Lego-like server base that solves their problems with precision.
15 Minutes of Fame: Air Superiority Squadron's Tenj takes ganking to the skies
From Hollywood celebrities to the guy next door, millions of people have made World of Warcraft a part of their lives. How do you play WoW? We're giving each approach its own 15 Minutes of Fame. Brace yourselves for nerdrage in the comments today -- for as they say, "PvP happens." Today, 15 Minutes of Fame covers (gasp!) actual world PvP on a PvP realm. Meet Tenj, master of the skies, leader of the Air Superiority Squadron on Twisting Nether (US-A), and renowned Azerothian aerial combat specialist. Tenj and his group of aerial assassins are in the business of bounties, plucking Horde players right out of the skies in fulfillment of their mercenary assignments. Tenj, an intrepid night elf boomkin, is known not only for his aerial antics but for rustling up world PvP in general -- and for responding to it all, enthusiastic cheering and nerdraging ranting alike, with a "Meep, meep!" more reminiscent of the hapless Roadrunner than a bounty-hunting boomkin. If you thought dozens of flight-form druids flapping down to silently surround ground-bound newbies was creepy, after reading about Tenj and his crew, you'll definitely never feel safe around druids again.
webOS 2.0, 'Roadrunner' device showing up in app logs?
We know that Palm plans on having webOS 2.0 out of the door this year -- and that it's "aggressively" cranking on its hardware roadmap -- so they've got to be in the later stages of testing at this point if they hope for any retail launches in time for the holidays, right? On that note, the developer responsible for the webOS flavor of Foursquare has noticed both webOS 2.0 entries and references to a new, previously unheard-of device codename "Roadrunner" in his app's logs on webOSroundup's Metrix analytics service; it can all be faked with enough effort, of course, but it would make a lot of sense for Palm's peeps to be testing new hardware and software with some of the more popular apps in the Catalog. For now, we're categorizing this one in the "totally plausible" category until we hear differently -- question is, what form is this Roadrunner gonna take?
TWC rebadges Sprint Overdrive, offers it as IntelliGo mobile 3G / 4G hotspot
And then, there were three. Three ways to snag an Overdrive, that is. Months after Sprint issued the original 3G / 4G mobile hotspot, Clear came along and introduced a rebadged version of the same thing. Now, Time Warner Cable (who is also in cahoots with Sprint and Clear) is following suit by tossing its logo on the all-too-familiar device and christening it the IntelliGo. Functionally, it's the same as ever -- there's a built-in battery that'll provide 3G / 4G mobile internet to a smattering (read: five) of nearby devices via WiFi, a microSD slot and USB connectivity. The difference here, though, is that it'll run you $49.99 on a two-year contract, and the fee will "vary by region." Speaking of regions, it'll be available wherever Road Runner Mobile is offered, which means Texas, North Carolina, Hawaii and Kansas City for now.
Cray Jaguar leaps past IBM Roadrunner as world's fastest supercomputer and pun generator (video)
Cray has finally clawed IBM back from the lead position on the Top500 Supercomputer chip-measuring contest. After just missing out on the title to IBM's Roadrunner last year, Cray's XT5 supercomputer (aka, Jaguar) at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee received an update from quad- to six-core Opteron processors to boast a 2.3 petaflop per second performance peak (theoretical) and 1.75 petaflops as measured by the Linpack benchmark; a feat requiring almost a quarter million AMD cores. IBM's Roadrunner, the very first supercomputer to race past the petaflop per second threshold, managed just 1.042 petaflops by comparison. Remember, one petaflop per second is equivalent to one quadrillion calculations per second. Of course, chip makers put their own spins on the list by noting that 4 of the top 5 systems depend on AMD for performance while Intel can be found powering 402 of the Top500. Video of the AMD processor upgrade procedure can be found after the break.
IBM's Sequoia: 20x faster than the world's fastest supercomputer
Roadrunner? Pfff, your chart-topping 1.105 petaflops are laughable. IBM just announced its 20-freaking-petaflop Sequoia supercomputer due for delivery by 2012. While supercomputer speeds have steadily increased year-over-year, a near 20x jump in calculations per second since the last world ranking is unheard of, even if the system has yet to come on-line. Slated to spend its life simulating nuclear explosions, Sequoia will use 45-nm (PowerPC, presumably) processors with 16 cores per chip for as many as 4,096 processors per rack. That's a total of 1.6 million cores assisted by 1.6 petabytes of memory. Perhaps all this processing power might help IBM understand the futility of its Lotus Notes strategy.
Roadrunner beats Jaguar in TOP500 supercomputer rankings, cartoon antics strangely absent
While titles like "world's fastest" and "world's largest" are fleeting at best, it's rare that we see such things taken down this quickly. Last week Cray delivered a big dish of braggadocio, talking up its 1.64 petaflop XT Jaguar supercomputer as the fastest (non-classified) machine in the world. Now, like some rocket skate-wearing coyote who's run out of thrust, it's been stymied by IBM's Roadrunner, deployed at Los Alamos. TOP500 is the authority on these matters and that list's latest rankings place Roadrunner in first place with a speed of 1.105 petaflops; Cray's Jag comes in second with a paltry 1.059. What about that 1.64 figure from last week? That was the hypothetical limit, and while it did deliver real-world performance of 1.3 petaflops for the folks at Oak Ridge, TOP500 relies on the Linpack benchmark for its ratings and apparently the Jag just couldn't deliver the goods there. Perhaps, Cray, it's time to make another call to ACME -- or AMD as it were.
Time Warner Cable customers experience World of Warcraft trouble
Many of us with cable internet connections are well aware of the problems that arise when cable companies specifically block certain applications, such as the recent problems with Comcast blocking Bit Torrent. It looks like there may be a similar problem with Time Warner and Roadrunner Cable, as many of their customers have found to it difficult to impossible to play due to lag and latency issues for some time, reports the New York Post. To some extent, both TWC and Blizzard have been blaming each other for a while, with Time Warner claiming they have done nothing to block any packets or traffic related to World of Warcraft, and Blizzard pointing out that all of the players on the east coast with these problems are Time Warner/Roadrunner cable customers. It's difficult to say if Time Warner is being genuine in their confusion, since other ISPs have lied about similar issues in the past, but there are signs they are taking this seriously. They have contacted Blizzard's ISP, and players are saying that they have been contacted by Time Warner representatives looking to fix the problem. Seeing the issue making it into print media, perhaps, will give them the extra initiative they need to get it completely sorted.
IBM creates new supercomputer with Cell processor
The Cell processor, known as the heart of the PS3, is being used every day in rather extraordinary situations. IBM has crafted yet another supercomputer, codenamed Roadrunner, which runs at a record-setting petaflop speed. (A petaflop is the equivalent of one thousand trillion calculations per second.) This speed makes Roadrunner twice as fast as the previous best supercomputer."We are getting closer to simulating the real world," Bijan Davari, vice president of next generation computing systems at IBM, told BBC News. The computer will be installed in a US government laboratory to monitor the US nuclear stockpile. It will also be used for research into astronomy, genomics and climate change.The Roadrunner will use less than 20,000 chips, and will use a hybrid design of both conventional supercomputer chips, and PS3's Cell processor. The next design by IBM will be nicknamed "Skynet."[Thanks, Richard!]
World's fastest: IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer breaks petaflop barrier using Cell and Opteron processors
When you're looking to set a record this is how you do it. Not only has IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer come on-line, it's now the world's fastest -- twice as fast as the old BluGene/L champ -- and churning through 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second. The $133 million supercomputer achieved the milestone with the help of 12,960 "improved" Cell processors (yes, like those powering your PS3) and a smaller number of AMD Opteron processors -- 116,640 processor cores in total. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending upon your perspective), Roadrunner is for military use only so you'll have to solve the traveling salesman problem on your own time. While not quite into Exaflop territory, we're definitely on the way.[Thanks, Chris S.]
