Roadrunner is a collaborative effort between Voltaire, NNSA, IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory that will primarily be used to ensure the safety and reliability of the United States' nuclear weapons stockpile. It will also be used for research into astrophysics, energy, disease pathways and global climate.

"Architecting and deploying a new scale of supercomputer is a tremendous accomplishment. One of the pleasant surprises was the stability of the system as it scaled up in size", stated Andy White, Roadrunner Project Director at Los Alamos National Laboratory. "The incredible amount of compute power harnessed by this machine will further the country's national security initiatives and aid in new scientific discoveries."

The supercomputer is built entirely from industry-standard hardware and based on the Linux operating system. Based on a hybrid, triblade design, each node consists of two IBM BladeCenter QS22 blades that contain four Cell processors and an LS21 blade with two AMD Opteron chips. The supercomputer uses a total of 26 Voltaire Grid Director 2012 288-port 20 Gbps InfiniBand switches for the high performance interconnect

Voltaire switches deliver 20 Gbps bandwidths and latencies of less than one microsecond to accelerate application performance by as much as 300% as compared to using Ethernet. Moreover, the switches’ power-efficient design offers lower power and cooling requirements as compared to 1 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet offerings. Voltaire switches employ a unique design that supports both fibre and copper cabling and the longest distances for InfiniBand.

"Voltaire is honoured to partner with NNSA, Los Alamos and IBM to break new ground with the development of the world's first petaflop supercomputer", stated Ronnie Kenneth, CEO and chairman, Voltaire. "By selecting Voltaire InfiniBand-based switches as the interconnect, Los Alamos will be able to capitalize on the supercomputer's intensity to run complex calculations and simulations faster and more efficiently."