IT'S the end of the line for Roadrunner, a first-of-its-kind collection of processors that once reigned as the world's fastest supercomputer.
The $US121 million ($116m) supercomputer, housed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico, will be decommissioned. The reason? The world of supercomputing is evolving and Roadrunner has been replaced with something smaller, faster, more energy efficient and cheaper.
"Roadrunner got everyone thinking in new ways about how to build and use a supercomputer," said Gary Grider of the lab's high-performance computing division. "Specialised processors are being included in new ways on new systems and being used in novel ways. Our example with Roadrunner caused everyone to pay attention."
In 2008, Roadrunner was first to break the elusive petaflop barrier by processing just over a quadrillion mathematical calculations per second.
Los Alamos teamed up with IBM to build Roadrunner. They ended up with 278 refrigerator-size racks filled with two different types of processors, all linked together by 88km of fibre-optic cable. It took nearly two dozen tractor trailer trucks to deliver the supercomputer from New York to New Mexico.
The supercomputer has been used over the past five years to model viruses and unseen parts of the universe, to better understand lasers and for nuclear weapons work. That includes simulations aimed at ensuring the safety and reliability of the nation's ageing arsenal.
As part of the US nuclear stockpile stewardship program, researchers used Roadrunner's high-speed calculation capabilities to unravel some of the mysteries of energy flow in weapons.
Los Alamos has been helping pioneer novel computer systems for decades. "And to think of where we're going to be in the next 10 to 15 years, it's just mind-boggling," said lab spokesman Kevin Roark.
Right now, Los Alamos - along with Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California - is using a supercomputer dubbed Cielo. Installed in 2010, it's slightly faster than Roadrunner, takes up less space and came in at just under $US54m.
Mr Roark said in the next 10 to 20 years it was expected that the world's supercomputers would be capable of breaking the exascale barrier, or one quintillion calculations per second.
