Breaking The Petaflops Barrier

In this paper, we discuss the impact of petascale computing and the major issues to getting beyond a petaflops. We describe IBM approaches to petascale computing but with a major focus on the Los Alamos National Laboratory Roadrunner machine. We provide an overview of the hardware and software structures, focusing on the new triblade compute node architecture and the corresponding data control and synchronization software support to enable high-performance computing applications on this architecture. The fundamental technology drivers and issues for petascale computing and beyond are software complexity, energy efficiency, and system reliability, availability, and serviceability.