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This past weekend, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) decommissioned Roadroader, the first petaflop supercomputer. It was only five short years ago that the machine took the crown as the world?s fastest.

Roadrunner was switched off March 31. But in the month or so between its shutdown and actual dismantlement, LANL plans on performing experiments on operating-system memory compression techniques, as well as optimized data routing, in order to help guide the design of future clustered computers.

The problem? Cost, both of electricity and storage. Although Roadrunner still ranks among the top 25 most powerful systems in the world, LANL said that future solutions will need ?to improve on Roadrunner?s energy efficiency to make the power bill affordable,? plus require new solutions for handling and storing the vast amount of data produced on a regular basis. Once fourth on the Green500 list of the most energy-efficient supercomputers, the system had since fallen to 148th in the most recent tally, with smaller, less powerful supercomputers such as ?Moonlight? and ?Luna? replacing it. Cielo, also a petaflop supercomputer Los Alamos, has replaced Roadrunner.

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