Where it is hip to count flops

Last summer the Department of Energy's $120 million dollar IBM Roadrunner supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory was declared the fastest computer in the world, churning out an incredible 1.026 petaflops, the first system ever to break the petaflops barrier.

The word "flops" is an acronym for Floating Point Operations Per Second, and 1 petaflops represents 1,000 trillion calculations per second. The Roadrunner accomplishment is all the more remarkable given the fastest machine the year before was another IBM supercomputer, BlueGene/L at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which could only process 280 teraflops.

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Last summer the Department of Energy's $120 million dollar IBM Roadrunner supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory was declared the fastest computer in the world, churning out an incredible 1.026 petaflops, the first system ever to break the petaflops barrier.

The word "flops" is an acronym for Floating Point Operations Per Second, and 1 petaflops represents 1,000 trillion calculations per second. The Roadrunner accomplishment is all the more remarkable given the fastest machine the year before was another IBM supercomputer, BlueGene/L at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which could only process 280 teraflops.

Click to see: Counting the flops

Two other supercomputers, both from Cray (and housed at Oak Ridge and Sandia National Laboratories) barely made it past 100 teraflops. In fact, the raw computational power of Roadrunner is so staggering that it exceeds the combined performance of the top 10 systems from the contest of June 2007.

HPC in the enterprise

The market for High Performance Computing (HPC) has been steadily growing over the last 15 years, increasing by a multiple of 1000 in the last decade alone thanks to vertical (more CPUs and cores) and horizontal (more nodes) scaling.

On the hardware side, HPC is benefiting from the advancements in chip technologies from Intel and AMD (with their multi/many core CPUs). Roadrunner uses about 6,000 dual-core AMD Opteron CPUs, in addition to 12,000 of IBM's proprietary PowerXCell 8i chip.

Supercomputers are becoming less expensive, greener, more open and clustered, making them suitable for markets beyond the traditional government labs, universities and energy (oil and gas) companies. Now, industries such as aerospace (and manufacturing as a whole), and finance (where analysis is heavily dependent on processor-intensive algorithms) are being drawn to HPC.

HPC, for example, can be used for enterprise solutions such as elimination of physical prototyping for autos and airplanes, simulation of climatic control and other features for the design of luxury cars, analysis of customer behavior, identification of business trends to manage global supply chains, data mining solutions involving neural networks and so on.

Almost all hardware vendors are readying HPC offerings, inlcuding mainstream server vendors such as Dell, Sun and HP, supercomputing leaders such as IBM, and specialized vendors like Cray (who is partnering with Microsoft), Bull, Fujitsu, SGI, Siemens, Unisys and others.

Other key members of the HPC ecosystem include hardware vendors that specialize in memory, video and communication equipment, such as NVIDIA, Seagate and CISCO, and enablers such as Intel and AMD. In addition, hardware appliance vendors like Azul Systems are addressing niche application areas of HPC, such as memory resident eXtreme Transaction Processing (XTP) for financial markets.

It is likely HPC clusters will be the central building blocks of many on-premise and cloud computing infrastructures, helping established enterprises and start-ups leverage the throughput of the platform in their efforts to accelerate their go-to-market programs.