LANL & Supercomputing

Not that Los Alamos National Laboratory ever left the business of computing leadership, it will go back to having the world's most powerful system when the $110 million Roadrunner computer starts operating next year, reports the Wall Street Journal. The project is just another example of new things at the national laboratories as they are in the midst of big changes. IBM is building Roadrunner, which "may be the biggest bet to date on hybrid supercomputing, combining AMD chips with processors used in Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3 system," the November 6 Journal report said. Hybrid supercomputing adds specialized accelerator chips to what are called x86 "multicore" chips that have the core circuitry of multiple microprocessors on the chip.
Computing has always been a principal activity at LANL, dating to the lab's creation in the 1940s, because of the need for fast and massive calculations in its nuclear weapons work.