End of the road for Roadrunner:
LOS ALAMOS, N. M., March 29, 2013—Roadrunner, the first supercomputer to break the once-elusive petaflop barrier—one million billion calculations per second—will be decommissioned on Sunday, March 31.
Found via World’s top supercomputer from ‘09 is now obsolete, will be dismantled:
Five years ago, an IBM-built supercomputer designed to model the decay of the US nuclear weapons arsenal was clocked at speeds no computer in the history of Earth had ever reached. At more than one quadrillion floating point operations per second (that’s a million billion, or a “petaflop”), the aptly-named Roadrunner was so far ahead of the competition that it earned the #1 slot on the Top 500 supercomputer list in June 2008, November 2008, and one last time in June 2009.
Today, that computer has been declared obsolete and it’s being taken offline. Based at the US Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Roadrunner will be studied for a while and then ultimately dismantled. While the computer is still one of the 22 fastest in the world, it isn’t energy-efficient enough to make the power bill worth it.
That’s where we are now – energy efficiency is more important than raw power. The world’s 22nd fastest computer is being shut down because it’s eating too much electricity!