LOS ALAMOS SUPERCOMPUTER, ONCE WORLD’S FASTEST, RETIRED

Los Alamos National Laboratory turned off its history-making Roadrunner supercomputer Sunday, ending a successful run for the pioneering IBM collaboration that marked the first computer to break the “petaflop” barrier—a quadrillion floating point calculations per second. Roadrunner accomplished the feat by adopting a revolutionary hybrid design that leveraged advanced chip designs originally developed for the demanding video game market. The machine gained notoriety as the nuclear weapons research machine built on the back of Sony PlayStation hardware. In the years since Roadrunner broke the barrier in 2008, far faster top-end computers have been developed, dropping the IBM-LANL machine to 22nd on the latest Top 500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers. Work done by Roadrunner for the nuclear weapons program has in recent years been shifted to Cielo, a somewhat faster machine that also is more energy efficient.