Supercomputers/Systems/Roadrunner
USA · decommissioned · classified
Roadrunner
Operated by Los Alamos National Laboratory at Los Alamos Strategic Computing Complex .
Researched with AI assistance, checked by scripts. These rows were researched by AI agents reading public operator, laboratory and vendor sources, appended by scripts and checked by automated validation; no subject-matter expert has reviewed them (how this site is made). A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1350 of 1540 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 64 are genuinely weakly sourced. Every claim carries its source and a confidence tier. Treat anything below verified as a lead, not a citation.
Measured performance
- Rmax
- 1.03 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 1.38 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 74.6%
- Cores
- 122,400
- Power
- 2.35 MW
- Per watt
- 0.4 GF/W
Figures are as last publicly reported for the configuration described below, not a live measurement. Where a system was upgraded in place, the post-upgrade configuration is shown and the earlier one appears in the timeline.
What this machine is made of
One row per supplier relationship. “Supplier at build” is the company that shipped the part at the time; where that company has since been acquired, the parent it rolls up to today is shown beside it. That distinction is what makes ticker-level aggregation possible across a thirty-year dataset.
| Role | Part | Supplier at build | Quantity | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Integrator | - IBM BladeCenter QS22/LS21 | IBM | - | Reported | ibm.comlanl.gov |
| Accelerator | IBM PowerXCell 8i Accelerators Cell BE (PPE + 8 SPE) · 9C · 3.2 GHz · 65 nm · 92 W IBM PowerXCell 8i | IBM | - | Reported | ibm.comlanl.gov |
| CPU | AMD Opteron 2210 (Santa Rosa) CPUs x86-64 · 2C · 1.8 GHz · 90 nm · 95 W AMD Opteron dual-core, hybrid tri-blade | AMD | - | Estimated | ibm.comlanl.gov |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand DDR Interconnect Fat tree · 20 Gb/s per 4x port · About 2 microseconds InfiniBand DDR | Mellanox NVDANASDAQ
rolls up to NVIDIA | - | Reported | ibm.comlanl.gov |
| Storage | Panasas ActiveScale (PanFS) Storage Object storage, blade shelves (1 director + 10 storage blades) Comprised of Panasas blades RAID 5 or RAID 10 on a per-object basis | Panasas | - | Verified | msstconference.orgroute-fifty.com |
| Cooling | Air cooling (CRAC/CRAH) Cooling Room-level air handling · Practical ceiling around 15-20 kW per rack Roadrunner is air-cooled utilizing large copper heat sinks and variable-speed fans | IBM | - | Reported | linuxjournal.com |
| Operating system | Red Hat Enterprise Linux Operating systems Linux distribution · Open source, commercial support subscription Roadrunner runs on Linux - Red Hat to be exact | Red Hat | - | Reported | linuxjournal.com |
The read
The first petaflop machine, and the first heterogeneous one: AMD Opteron host processors paired with IBM PowerXCell 8i accelerators in a hybrid tri-blade. The accelerator/host split it introduced is now the default architecture for essentially everything on this site. The Cell line itself did not survive: an early demonstration that being first in the accelerator role does not confer durable share.
Timeline
- 2006 Announced source
- 2008-06 List debut at #1 (June 2008) source
- 2008-06 First operational source
- 2013-03 Decommissioned on March 31 due to low energy efficiency compared to newer systems source
- 2013-03 Decommissioned source
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Site & facility
Los Alamos Strategic Computing Complex
- Location
- Los Alamos, NM, USA
- Cooling
- Chilled water
- Commissioned
- 1993
Source check
We fetched this system's own citations and recorded whether each page actually mentions it. This is a corroboration signal, not a fact check, and it is published so you can see how well the sourcing holds up rather than take it on trust.
| Cited source | Result | Found on the page |
|---|---|---|
| energy.gov | names system only | - |
| osti.gov | could not be fetched | - |
Checked 2026-10-18 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.
Further reading
Inside a node
Why accelerators exist, what the memory hierarchy costs, and how the CPU and accelerator merged onto one package.
Operating a supercomputer
Acceptance testing, why "installed" and "in production" are six months apart, and the machine lifecycle.
The interconnect
Topologies, why latency and tail behaviour matter more than bandwidth, and how the fabric market consolidated.