Voltaire Powers World’s Most Powerful Supercomputer for NNSA’s Los Alamos

The world’s largest supercomputer for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Los Alamos National Laboratory, nicknamed Roadrunner, uses Voltaire's InfiniBand-based switches to achieve sustained performance of 1,026 trillion calculations per second, breaking the petaflop barrier. Roadrunner claimed the number-one position on the Top500 (www.top500.org) list from June 2008 through November 2009. 

Roadrunner is a collaborative effort between Voltaire, NNSA, IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory that is primarily used to ensure the safety and reliability of the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile.  It is also used for research into astrophysics, energy, disease pathways and global climate.

“Architecting and deploying a new scale of supercomputer is a tremendous accomplishment.  One of the pleasant surprises was the stability of the system as it scaled up in size,” said Andy White, Roadrunner Project Director at Los Alamos National Laboratory.  “The incredible amount of compute power harnessed by this machine will further the country’s national security initiatives and aid in new scientific discoveries.”

The supercomputer is built entirely from industry-standard hardware and based on the Linux operating system. Based on a hybrid, triblade design, each node consists of two IBM BladeCenter QS22 blades that contain four Cell processors and an LS21 blade with two AMD Opteron chips.  The supercomputer uses a total of 26 Voltaire Grid Director™ 2012 288-port 20 Gb/s InfiniBand switches for the high performance interconnect.

“Voltaire is honored to partner with NNSA, Los Alamos and IBM to break new ground with the development of the world’s first petaflop supercomputer,” said Ronnie Kenneth, CEO and chairman, Voltaire. “By selecting Voltaire InfiniBand-based switches as the interconnect, Los Alamos will be able to capitalize on the supercomputer’s intensity to run complex calculations and simulations faster and more efficiently.”