Overview
IBM built the computer for the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration. It is a hybrid design with 12,960 IBM PowerXCell 8i and 6,480 AMD Opteron dual-core processors in specially designed blade servers connected by Infiniband. The Roadrunner uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux along with Fedora as its operating systems and is managed with xCAT distributed computing software. It also uses the Open MPI Message Passing Interface implementation.
Roadrunner occupies approximately 560 square metres (6,000 sq ft) and became operational in 2008.
The DOE use the computer for simulating how nuclear materials age in order to predict whether the USA's aging arsenal of nuclear weapons are safe and reliable. Other uses for the Roadrunner include the science, financial, automotive and aerospace industries.
Read more about this topic: IBM Roadrunner