A publication of the Advanced Simulation & Computing Division, NA-121.2, NNSA Defense Programs
March 2009
NA-ASC-500-09—Issue 10
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Roadrunner to Expand Hybrid Computing Applications
On December 22, 2008, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) officially accepted the Roadrunner Phase 3 system from IBM. Having met this significant contractual milestone, LANL is moving to the next step of system and code stabilization. See the timeline graphic showing Roadrunner’s implementation schedule from August 2008 to January 2010. Weapons and Open Science code runs are being used to accomplish the stabilization.
Roadrunner installed in the Nicholas C. Metropolis Center for Modeling and Simulation at Los Alamos National Laboratory. (Photo by R. Robinson, LANL)
As part of the system and code stabilization effort for the ASC Roadrunner petascale installation at LANL, 10 Open Science projects have been chosen from a field of 29 proposals in a selective process to use Roadrunner this spring. The Open Science runs will increase the number of codes that can take advantage of the Roadrunner hybrid architecture, and will be the driver for many other applications worldwide. Abstracts of the LANL Open Science projects can be found at http://www.lanl.gov/roadrunner/rropenscienceabstracts.shtml Roadrunner has already successfully run codes including VPIC (plasma physics), SPaSM (molecular dynamics), MC transport (IMC), and deterministic transport (Sweep3D).
The Weapons and Open Science stabilization is an exciting time for scientists in the high performance computing (HPC) and ASC communities. It is a time of rapid and unprecedented innovation. Roadrunner is large enough to model physical processes that are closer to nature and achieve greater precision in the solutions to enormously complex problems. The fastest computer in the world, Roadrunner is the first to run petascale simulations, and represents a significant step toward meeting ASC’s major predictive capability goals.
Roadrunner timeline from August 2008 to January 2010.
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