IBM sure enjoys dominating the Top500 rankings and their latest supercomputer for the US Department of Energy only gives them more reason to gloat. Roadrunner, costing $100 million and soon to be housed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, operates at over one thousand trillion calculations per second, or at roughly 1.5 petaflops according to a video released by IBM (more below). According to IBM, it would take 100,000 of today's fastest laptops to match its performance.

Several interesting facts have emerged. First, Red Hat Linux provides its software foundation. And the name Roadrunner is a nod to New Mexico's state bird. But more importantly, IBM is billing it as the first hybrid supercomputer, utilizing both Cell processors and AMD Opterons. Interestingly enough, this design may very well end up making it one of the greenest supercomputers in existence.

Compared to most traditional supercomputer designs, Roadrunner's hybrid format sips power (3.9 megawatts) and delivers world-leading efficiency -- 376 million calculations per watt. IBM expects Roadrunner to place among the top energy-efficient systems later in June when the official "Green 500" list of supercomputers is issued.

As for other specs, IBM helpfully offers the following:

In total, Roadrunner connects 6,948 dual- core AMD Opteron chips (on IBM Model LS21 blade servers) as well as 12,960 Cell engines (on IBM Model QS22 blade servers). The Roadrunner system has 80 terabytes of memory, and is housed in 288 refrigerator-sized, IBM BladeCenter(R) racks occupying 6,000 square feet. Its 10,000 connections -- both Infiniband and Gigabit Ethernet -- require 57 miles of fiber optic cable. Roadrunner weighs 500,000 lbs. Companies that contributed components and technology include; Emcore, Flextronics, Mellanox and Voltaire.

Roadrunner's hybrid underpinnings are due to some clever engineering on Big Blue's part.

Two IBM QS22 blade servers and one IBM LS21 blade server are combined into a specialized "tri-blade" configuration for Roadrunner. The machine is composed of a total of 3,456 tri-blades built in IBM's Rochester, Minn. plant. Standard processing (e.g., file system I/O) is handled by the Opteron processors. Mathematically and CPU-intensive elements are directed to the Cell processors. Each tri-blade unit can run at 400 billion operations per second (400 Gigaflops).

You can catch an IBM-supplied YouTube video of the tech behind Roadrunner below.

Thanks Dan!