Fast, Faster, Petaflop

COMPUTERS

WHEN THE WORLD'S fastest supercomputers were ranked last November at www.top500.org, BlueGene/L, the IBM machine at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California was still reigning champion. Thanks to a recent upgrade, it now reaches the breakneck speed of 478.2 teraflops-a teraflop being a trillion calculations per second. But BlueGene/L won't remain No. 1 for long. By early 2009, a new generation of supercomputers will leave it in the dust. These turbocharged machines will perform at least a quadrillion (1,000 trillion)-calculations per second. That speed is called 1 petaflop, and it's more than twice the rate of BlueGene/L. One contender for the first petaflop computer is Roadrunner, being built by IBM for DOE's Los Alamos National Laboratory. It will use souped-up versions of the Cell processors found in Sony PlayStation 3 consoles. Another contender is the Cray supercomputer, code-named Baker, destined for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Livermore also expects to have an IBM petaflop machine by 2010, and the National Science Foundation is bankrolling an IBM petaflopper, Blue Waters, to be housed at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Researchers say petascale machines-which cost around $200 million-are needed to crunch the amazing amounts of scientific, medical, technical, and military data collected by powerful telescopes, climate satellites, and gene analyzers. The massive computational power of these supercomputers will enable scientists to create simulations that can speed drug development, improve weather and climate-change predictions, develop new materials, and help us understand the evolution of the galaxies. Petascale supercomputers will eventually give way to true monsters: the exascale supercomputers capable of handling a jaw-dropping million trillion calculations per second.-TG

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