If you need to take a moment to think of a joke about a particular speedy bird and its coyote companion, we understand. Otherwise, it's time to raise a toast today to one of the computing world's heavyweights, the first supercomputer that ever managed to hit a sustained petaflop in operations per second and one that could be frequently found at the top of the list of the world's most powerful supercomputers around 2008 to 2009.

We're talking, of course, about IBM's Roadrunner, which has officially reached the end of its days. The Los Alamos National Laboratory, Roadrunner's home base throughout its five years of operational use, will officially decommission the giant today  wave goodbye to the functional use of its 12,960 IBM PowerXCell 8i and 6,480 AMD Opteron dual-core processors, nearly 114 terabytes of memory, and approximately 1.09 million terabytes of storage.

"Roadrunner was a truly pioneering idea," said Gary Grider, deputy divison leader of the High Performance Computing Division at the laboratory, in a statement.

"Roadrunner got everyone thinking in new ways about how to build and use a supercomputer. Specialized processors are being included in new ways on new systems, and being used in novel ways. Our demonstration with Roadrunner caused everyone to pay attention."

To clarify, Roadrunner isn't being taken apart piece by piece today. Researchers will continue to run experiments on Roadrunner to determine new methods for compressing operating system memory and optimizing data routing. In other words, they'll be hitting up a number of tests that couldn't have been run while Roadrunner was churning away on its various research projects, which included simulating how nuclear materials age, nanowire material behavior, laser backscattering, and a little ol' thing called the "simulation of the raw universe at a 70-billion particle scale."

The supercomputer, which eats up approximately 6,000 square feet of space and cost $125 million to build, isn't necessarily being decommissioned because it's been dwarfed by the speeds of its more powerful peers. In fact, Roadrunner still sits at number twenty-two on the list of the world's most powerful supercomputers.

However, this performance comes with a price: Namely, the energy costs required to keep the computer running compared to its more svelte competitors. Roadrunner eats up 2,345 kilowatts to achieve its 1,042 teraflops' worth of performance. In contrast, system number five on the list of speediest systems  IBM's Juqueen supercomputer at Germany's Forschungszentrum Juelich  requires just 1,970 kilowatts of juice to hit 4,141 teraflops of performance.

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