IBM will be responsible for building the Roadrunner supercomputer for the US Department of energy's national nuclear safety administration.

Roadrunner is a super computer based on Cell processor BladeCenter H and Systemx3755 based on AMD dual core heart dragon processor.

It uses the newly developed Hybrid Programming and AMD Torrenza software to connect different platforms.

In the next two years, the computer will be installed step by step at the National Laboratory of Los Alamos, New Mexico.

The government expects the total cost of the project to be US $110 million.

The Roadrunner computer is closely related to the Cell microprocessor joint design center in Austen, Texas, USA.

The supercomputer will use 16000 Cell processors jointly developed by IBM, Japan's Sony Corp and Toshiba Co, which will be used in SONY's upcoming SONY PS3 game console.

In addition, it will adopt more than 16000 AMD dragon server chips.

The operation module of Roadrunner supercomputer

Roadrunner will be installed in 2008, and its performance is expected to exceed 1petaflop (equivalent to 10 million billion math operations per second). The peak performance will reach 1.6 petaflops, and its computing power is 4 times that of the world's fastest supercomputer BlueGeneL (blue color gene).

The BlueGeneL supercomputer is installed in the Laurence Livermore National Laboratory (Lawrence Livermore Laboratory) under the US Department of energy in California, which is also built by IBM.

Blue gene supercomputer

The Roadrunner supercomputer will run the Linux operating system. In addition, it will need to use the advanced hybrid programming software to coordinate the work between the AMD chip and the Cell chip.

The engineers of IBM and AMD in Austen will work together with IBM researchers in New York to jointly design the Roadrunner computer, which will be assembled in Rochester City, Minnesota.

Next, IBM will work with the Los Alamos National Laboratory to develop the software needed to run the hybrid chip computer.

After the completion of the supercomputer, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the first atomic bomb ever to be born, will make use of it to carry out extremely complicated military and civilian scientific research.

If the new hybrid computer architecture is successful in Los Alamos National Laboratory, IBM hopes to adopt similar design methods to develop high-performance supercomputers for other applications such as life sciences research, automotive engineering, financial services and aviation design.

David Jursik, vice president of depth computing at IBM, said: "once we develop programming models and tools, we will be able to apply this computer architecture to a wider range of projects.

We are very excited about this.

In addition, the computer will also adopt advanced cooling and power management technology, and its area will be greatly reduced. It is expected to be "only" 12000 square feet, which is about three basketball courts.