July 08 Issue - Employee Monthly Magazine

Achievement born of collaboration

Teamwork key to Roadrunner's success

Photo by LeRoy N. Sanchez,

At times when Roadrunner’s prospects seemed bleak, John Turner of Algorithms and Applications was reminded of a story Apollo astronaut Ken Mattingly tells of success being met because everyone working on the project said to themselves “It won’t fail because of me.” According to Turner, Roadrunner has been a success thus far and will continue to deliver for the same reason.

The supercomputer made history as the world’s most powerful on May 26 when it exceeded a sustained speed of 1 petaflop/s, or 1 thousand trillion calculations per second. That’s the equivalent of each of Earth’s 6 billion people using a hand calculator to work together on a calculation

24 hours per day, 365 days a year performing 10 calculations per second—in which case it would take 46 years to do what Roadrunner could do in one day.

The lesson of Roadrunner, said Turner, is that outstanding talent working toward a common goal can achieve incredible things, even in the face of tremendous challenges.

“Roadrunner was a very complex undertaking with many potential pitfalls along the way,” said Josip Loncaric of High Performance Computing System Integration. “We had to work very hard to convince ourselves and others that Roadrunner could deliver petascale performance and that such a large advanced architecture machine could be productive.”

Those challenges were overcome through collaboration and teamwork on the part of 200-plus Lab employees and management, he said. “Once the go-ahead decision was reached, IBM built Roadrunner in record time and demonstrated petaflop performance on schedule,” Loncaric said.

Personality of a computer

An advanced architecture computer capable of solving scientific problems of unprecedented complexity and scale, Roadrunner will help meet the nation’s evolving national security needs by performing calculations that vastly improve the ability to certify that the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile is reliable without conducting underground nuclear tests.

Its inner workings—powered by a special IBM-developed variant of the Cell processors used in the Sony Playstation® 3—somewhat parallel the teamwork demonstrated by those contributing to its success.

“Think of Roadrunner as a work crew with different skills and tools, collaboratively solving a single problem,” suggests Loncaric. “Specialization enables people to become really good at specific jobs, and the management challenge is to organize the work flow. Roadrunner follows a similar path to enable many thousands of processors of three basic types to work more productively and efficiently.”

To say that Roadrunner “suffers” from multiple-personality disorder just may be a compliment, said Turner, as that’s one of its advantages. “Rather than imposing a single programming model, Roadrunner allows an application developer to choose one, or a combination, most appropriate for his or her algorithms,” he explained, adding that scientific discoveries enabled by Roadrunner could benefit biofuel alternatives and the search for an HIV vaccine.

With its incredible speed and potential for solving new problems that could not have been imagined before, Manuel Vigil, Roadrunner Project manager in the High Performance Computing Division, believes Roadrunner ushers in a new area of computing performance and architecture necessary to continue pushing the forefront of scientific discovery.

“Roadrunner is a huge achievement for the Laboratory in demonstrating that LANL can continue to provide leadership-class computing and manage and succeed at implementing large-scale projects,” Vigil said. “But even more important is the potential Roadrunner brings to bear in solving scientific applications for the weapons programs as well as other scientific areas.”

Potential yet unlocked

“This is only the end of a beginning,” said Loncaric. Roadrunner’s real work still is ahead, and there is much to be done to exploit its capabilities, he noted. The full machine will be moved to Los Alamos beginning this month and housed in the Nicholas Metropolis Center for Modeling and Simulation, with the first computing applications expected to begin running in January 2009.

“In partnership with IBM, we designed and built the world’s first petascale supercomputer. We won’t stop there,” said Loncaric, adding that over the next several years, this machine should deliver new scientific insights and may lead to a new class of hybrid supercomputers.

“At the start of the 21st century, we face enormous challenges in national security, energy, health, global climate, and myriad other areas,” said Loncaric. “Roadrunner’s performance will enable us to gain timely insights and make educated choices in dealing with some of the most important problems we face.”

For more information about Roadrunner, see the Roadrunner Web site at http://www.lanl.gov/roadrunner.

-Mig Owens