World’s first petascale supercomputer will be shredded to bits

Yesterday we wrote about the death of IBM Roadrunner, the first supercomputer in the world to hit petascale speeds, a million billion floating point operations per second.

It’s being taken offline by the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, to be replaced by something faster and more energy-efficient. You might think that the individual pieces of the supercomputer could be useful to universities or research organizations. After all, this was the world’s fastest supercomputer as recently as 2009 and was still rated the twenty-second fastest in the world before being taken offline yesterday.

But it’s not to be. A Los Alamos spokesman told Ars today that while “a few selected items will be saved for historical purposes,” the majority of Roadrunner’s computing hardware “will be destroyed by shredding.” The destruction is necessary for security reasons, “because Roadrunner worked on classified calculations for many years.”

It’s sad to think of Roadrunner literally being shredded to bits, but shredding computer hardware containing sensitive data isn’t unusual. And there will be lots of shredding. Roadrunner contained 296 server racks covering 6,000 square feet, with 122,400 processor cores, and 104 terabytes of memory. Roadrunner had 2 petabytes of storage when it went online in 2008.

While Los Alamos said the majority of the hardware will be destroyed, it didn’t specify which parts might survive. We’ve asked Los Alamos to clarify whether it can destroy just the memory and storage without destroying the CPUs. However, the integration between memory and CPUs in the system might make that infeasible.

Now that Roadrunner has been shut off, researchers will study it for about a month to test techniques for operating system memory compression and optimized data routing. Then it will be dismantled and go on to the shredders.

Google, which houses a lot of sensitive data itself, also crushes and shreds hard drives after taking them out of production. This video Google made in 2011 provides some graphic evidence of the destruction rained upon old pieces of computer hardware:

Inside look at Google data center security.