Computers: Roadrunner

Roadrunner



Photo: Wyman Meinzer

The Roadrunner is the state bird of Texas. And this image is taken by the one and only offical state photographer of Texas, Wyman Meinzer. He also published a book about the Roadrunner.

The Roadrunner is faster than a rattle snake and likes to "play" with its pray.





"Roadrunner is a cluster of approximately 3,250 compute nodes interconnected by an off-the-shelf parallel-computing network. Each compute node consists of two AMD Opteron dual-core microprocessors, with each of the Opteron cores internally attached to one of four enhanced Cell microprocessors. This enhanced Cell does double-precision arithmetic faster and can access more memory than can the original Cell in a PlayStation 3. The entire machine will have almost 13,000 Cells and half as many dual-core Opterons."

Roadrunner, a new hybrid supercomputer that will use a video game chip to propel performance to petaflop/s speeds.