Posts tagged with Opteron
AMD CPU and GPU Technology – Flying High in the TOP500 Supercomputer List
Posted by Margaret Lewis in 4:29 PM
Loading ...While a lot of folks know me for having a passion (or is it an obsession) for virtualization and cloud computing – many people don’t realize that I am really a refugee from the world of High Performance Computing. This week I get to put on my propeller hat and attend SC09 in Portland to catch up on the leading innovations – and have a chance to say “Aloha” to my former colleagues at the Maui High Performance Computing Center (MHPCC).
One of the big events of this annual supercomputing conference is the release of the TOP500 Supercomputing List. In my past life I would wait impatiently to see how MHPCC systems would rank. Now I wait impatiently to see how AMD-based systems all over the world stack up. There are no disappointments in the 34th TOP500 List published this week, featuring 42 systems running AMD technology.
Five of these systems are located the elite class of the top 10 supercomputers in the world. Here are some “fun facts” for your enjoyment:
- The #1 supercomputer is Jaguar located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory – a Cray XT5 system running Six-Core AMD OpteronTM processors. Jaguar was originally built using Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors and over the past few months technicians at the Tennessee lab have been replacing many of those chips with newer six cores models. You can get more details on this very fast cat, which now features almost a quarter million high-performance cores, in John Fruehe’s blog.
- The #5 supercomputer is Tianhe-1, which represents the coming era of heterogeneous computing. Tainhe-1 was developed by NUDT for the National SuperComputer Center in Tianjin. It is the world’s highest performing GPU-based supercomputer ever and is fueled by ATI RadeonTM RV770 architecture, demonstrating the powerful computational capabilities of AMD’s GPU technology. Much like the x86 processor based systems, which first entered the TOP500 list about 10 years ago and now account for over 430 systems, this is just the beginning of a new trend – and we are already at the top already.
- The #2 system is Roadrunner, located at Los Alamos National Labs. This is another example of a hybrid computing system, utilizing both IBM PowerXCell and AMD Opteron processor technology. This system became the world’s first TOP500 petaflops system in 2008 and has previously held the #1 slot on the TOP500.
- The #3 system, Kraken is a Cray XT5 system located at the National Institute for Computational Sciences at the University of Tennessee. It is running Six Core AMD Opteron processors, and is one of the most powerful supercomputer funded by the NSF TeraGrid as well as one of the world’s largest computational platforms for open scientific research. Here is a link to a video that showcases how this powerful supercomputer is being used by the research community.
- My Alma Mater, the University of Texas, has its Ranger system located at the Texas Advanced Computing Center as #9 on the list. This system is also running Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor technology and provides unprecedented computational capabilities to the national research community. Go Horns!
And if you widen your view and take a look at #11 thru #20 on the TOP500 List, you will find that ½ of these systems are also running AMD Opteron processors. So while our competitor might claim quantity, we are thrilled to highlight the quality showing of AMD technology in the 34th TOP500. This reflects our drive to deliver leading edge innovation to the market. You can find more details about what we are planning in the future from the materials we presented on Financial Analyst Day on Nov. 11th.
And congratulations to the MHPCC, which has systems ranked at #58 and #114 on the TOP500 List. Maui no ka oi.
Margaret Lewis (@margaretjlewis) is a Product Marketing Director at AMD. Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
Cloud Computing: A Look Back and a Look Forward
Posted by Margaret Lewis in 4:39 PM
October is pretty active month in the cloud computing space, with two big events happening this week that caught my eye: the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco and the Cloud Adoption Arena virtual event. The Web 2.0 conference is about more than just the Internet; it’s evolved to focus on technologies & business models – particularly cloud computing. The Cloud Adoption Arena is taking a hard look at how the difficult year for the economy is actually spurring the adoption of cloud strategies. Quite simply, I love these kinds of conversations.
But all this talk about where the cloud is going got me thinking about where we’ve come from. In fact, it was almost exactly a year ago that I was talking about getting beyond the fluff of cloud computing, and eWEEK was asking if we can “bet on the cloud.” The evolution of cloud computing allows you to draw a number of parallels to similar technologies. Living and breathing virtualization, I can’t help but feel some déjà-vu when I hear the main issues of cloud computing discussed (both pros and cons): it’s incredible for efficiency, flexibility and scalability of your business, but what about manageability, security and overall maturity of the market? These are all things we’re saying about virtualization just a few short years ago.
But, like virtualization, the major players stepped up to drive cloud computing forward. VMware launched their vSphere operating system – a major step to addressing those concerns over manageability & security. Microsoft has launched their Azure platform, which helps simplify the entire development cycle of the cloud – from web developers to ISVs to system integrators. And, from a standards perspective, groups like the Cloud Security Alliance and the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) have taken control of this market to help ensure its evolving in a responsible way.
And, at AMD, we’ve been addressing the infrastructure needs. We now have a Six-Core AMD Opteron EE processor available that draws an ACP of 40W, as well as the “Kroner” server platform to further address energy efficiency. These low-power, highly scalable, fully-featured solutions help cloud providers operate an extremely efficient, highly utilized and dense computing environment.
The same way that AMD was ahead of the curve in developing on-chip virtualization features like Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) and focusing on low-power server processors to ensure a highly utilized physical machine was saving energy costs – AMD is out in front with cloud computing again. The conversation has evolved from “will this catch on” to “how can we shift our business model to adapt,” and it’s conferences like the two happening this week that are instrumental in driving that discussion.
What do you think? Are we finally beyond the fluff?
Margaret Lewis (@margaretjlewis) is a Product Marketing Director at AMD.
Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
AMD Opteron™ Processor + Our Partners = Masters of VMworld
Posted by tmueting in 6:08 PM
Well, once again we survived another whirlwind week at VMworld in San Francisco. I want to thank all of you that stopped by our booth to see our demonstrations or to attend one or more of our theater presentations. And, to those of you who attended my session on Thursday morning (after Wednesday night’s party no less!) – a special thank you. It was good to be able to meet many of you personally and I enjoyed hearing about your environment and your use of AMD OpteronTM processor-based platforms.
We ran a full slate of theater presentations in the AMD Booth and, from what I saw, every session was standing room only. This year we were treated to two customer presentations – Scott Ramnitz from First Data Corporation and Michael Foltz of Kroger Co. – two long time AMD customers and early adopters of virtualization shared their experiences.
In addition to Scott and Michael, on Tuesday Steve Pope, CTO of Solarflare Communications discussed the performance challenges that virtualization presents for I/O Devices. Solarflare is a leading silicon vendor delivering products that enable the rapid adoption of 10 Gigabit Ethernet for data center and enterprise networks. Along with Solarflare and VMware, we demonstrated near native performance of AMD’s I/O virtualization technology on an AMD engineering development system featuring 4 twelve-core AMD Opteron 6100 series processors (codenamed “Magny-Cours”) and four AMD SR5690 chipsets running VMware ESX 4.0 and Solarflare’s 10GeB NIC. Please note that the AMD OpteronTM 6100 series processors, code-named “Magny-Cours,” referenced below are scheduled to be launched in the first quarter of 2010.
On Wednesday, Ron Graham, Technical Marketing Manager from Sun lead a discussion on virtualization performance on AMD OpteronTM processor based Sun servers like the 8-socket Sun Fire X4600 M2 server and then again on Thursday Ron returned to discuss Sun’s AMD OpteronTM processor-based Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems that deliver mission-critical entry storage. One of the most popular sessions of the week was given by Simon Crosby, CTO of Virtualization for Citrix Corporation. Simon didn’t mince words while giving us his unique perspective on the state of virtualization today and what he believes we can expect in the future in his talk entitled ”Cloud Computing and Desktop Virtualization.” AMD continues our close work with Citrix on XenServer and XenApp and supported the Introduction of Xen Cloud Platform to help accelerate customer adoption of open enterprise-class cloud infrastructures.
Also on Thursday Armando Acosta, Product Manager from Dell presented “Dell Solutions to Power the Efficient Enterprise.” Armando discussed Dell’s AMD OpteronTM processor-based blade and rack server solutions designed specifically for virtualization and the enterprise, including the Dell PowerEdge 905 server which took home a 2009 InfoWorld Technology of the Year Award
For those of you who didn’t have a chance to attend one of these sessions or would like to revisit the slides you can see them here (along with a host of other information) at the AMD Booth on VMworld.com. Also check out the latest AMD Virtualization Update by AMD’s Director of Commercial Solutions, Margaret Lewis.
All-in-all it was another successful event for AMD. As virtualization is hitting mainstream AMD has released a full line of Six-Core AMD OpteronTM processors that provides superior value for your most important virtualization workloads. Don’t just take my word for it, according to a recent blog post at Solori that analyzes price/performance for 2-socket servers – “Istanbul continues to offer a 20-30% CAPEX value proposition against Nehalem in the virtualization use case…”
Tim Mueting is a Product Marketing Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
Countdown to VMworld – Hear the latest trends in Virtualization Straight from the Masters
Posted by tmueting in 8:41 PM
VMworld 2009 is just around the corner and you can be sure that AMD will be front and center at what has become one of the premier technical conferences of the year. I’m honored once again to be speaking at one of the breakout sessions during the week. I invite you to come join me on Thursday at 10am for a discussion on Virtualization and Cloud Computing with AMD OpteronTM processor-based platforms. I’ll be covering the latest in AMD OpteronTM processors including exciting new features from our most recent introduction of the Six-Core AMD OpteronTM processor (formerly codenamed “Istanbul”). It is the industry’s only six-core process for 2, 4 and 8 socket servers and offers 34% higher performance-per-watt than Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor-based servers in the same power and thermal envelopes.
I promise this will be much more than just a product presentation. I will provide valuable insight into what we’re seeing in the world of virtualization and cloud computing. I’m very excited to announce that we also plan to have a special guest speaker during this session. Not to give too much away, but we expect to have a very special customer that will discuss their experiences as they move towards their goal of being 96% virtualized in their datacenter. This particular customer has been using virtualization for past several years for server consolidation and high availability and they have implemented over 1500 hosted virtualized desktops running on AMD OpteronTM processor-based servers and VMware software.
And speaking of sessions, we also have a complete line-up in our Masters of Virtualization Theater in the AMD booth in the Exhibition Hall. Please come by and say hello. You can check out several of our demonstrations featuring emerging virtualization technologies and attend a variety of presentations to learn the latest and greatest from many of our closest OEMs and industry partners including Citrix, Dell, HP, Microsoft, Sun and Virtual Computer, just to name a few. And as a bonus, we have two of our key customers lined up to present and discuss their experiences with virtualization and AMD OpteronTM processor-based servers.
The theater presentations will run every hour on the hour and last approx 20 to 30 minutes including Q&A. Please consult your VMworld schedule for Exhibition hall times and come by our booth – #1408 – for a complete schedule of the AMD booth presentations.
And if you just can’t wait for the conference you can visit the AMD booth at the VMworld Virtual Conference. I’ve just posted a new “Ask the Experts” piece highlighting the Six-Core AMD OpteronTM processor – check out some of the other new material on AMD while you are there.
We’re just a few weeks away. I hope to see you all there.
Tim Mueting is a Product Marketing Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
Countdown to VMworld – Six-Core AMD Opteron™ Processor Flexes Its Muscle
Posted by Margaret Lewis in 9:34 AM
The AMD virtualization team is doing final preparation for VMworld 2009, to be held at Moscone Center in just a few weeks. I was fortunate enough to have attended the first VMworld conference in San Diego in 2004 – and to have made every VMworld conference since then. In this timeframe the AMD OpteronTM processor has grown from its humble single core roots to an impressive six-core processor with hardware assisted virtualization called AMD VirtualizationTM (AMD-VTM) technology that is designed to deliver a perfect balance of price, performance, and power.
Since its introduction in June, Six-Core AMD Opteron processor-based servers have been achieving some solid virtualization proof points. In fact, a new top 48-core VMmark score was recently posted by HP with its AMD Opteron processor-based HP ProLiant DL785 G6 server. This is a new high score for VMmark of 47.77@30 tiles – more than 30% higher than the top 48-core score posted with an Intel Xeon 7460 processor (”Dunnington”).
Six-Core AMD Opteron processor-based servers also currently hold the three top 24-core VMmark scores – the HP ProLiant DL585 G6 has the top spot, and the highest 24-core score for blade servers is held by the HP ProLiant BL685c G6. The SolutionsOriented Blog “RIP Dunnington: HP’s 4P/24-core Istanbul Takes VMmark Summit” takes a look at the dollars per VM of some of the 24-core systems producing these VMmark scores and showcases AMD with a price performance advantage of almost 14% to 28% over the competition, depending on configuration.
Now I don’t think everyone understands how challenging it is to design a processor that achieves a “perfect balance.” AMD engineers are tasked to develop a product with as much performance as possible within a stingy power budget- and all at a cost that addresses today’s market requirements. This is not a processor designed specifically to win “raw” performance benchmarks – but rather to handle real workloads and drive new efficiencies in the data center.
We plan to do a couple of other blogs that outline some of our activities at VMworld – so keep an eye on this blog and our friends over at the @Work site!
Margaret Lewis (@margaretjlewis) is a Product Marketing Director at AMD.
Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
Serving Up a Big Dose of Virtualization with Windows Server 2008 R2
Posted by Margaret Lewis in 10:53 AM
This has been a big week for the Windows Operating System. Along with the much awaited “Release to Manufacturing” (RTM) of Windows 7, we also saw the RTM of Windows Server 2008 R2.
Many of the improvements in Windows Server 2008 R2 are centered on Hyper-V, Microsoft’s hypervisor that ships with the product. Noteworthy is the support for Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI), a key feature of AMD-VTM technology that is designed to reduce the complexity of memory handling and enhance performance for demanding applications like web serving and database. My colleague Tim Mueting has an in-depth Q&A on RVI posted on the Doing It Virtual web site if you want a more detailed look at the technology.
In addition Windows Server 2008 R2 offers live migration capabilities. This long awaited functionality, which allows the migration of running VMs between physical hosts, is a standard feature of the basic Server 2008 R2 product as well as with the upcoming Hyper-V 2008 R2 Server. This means you don’t have to pay extra for this key functionality. Hyper-V Live Migration is supported on up to 16 node clusters. AMD OpteronTM processors have included Extend Migration functionality since 2005, designed specifically to enable live migration capabilities in virtualization software. Check out the video on YouTube that showcases Hyper-V Live Migration on AMD Opteron processor-based servers.
Windows Server 2008 R2 is also about scalability offering support of up to 64 processors cores and up to 384 VMs running concurrently per host system in Hyper-V. This provides seamless support for the HP ProLiant DL785 G6 8 Socket featuring Six-Core AMD Opteron processors.
So congratulations to Microsoft on another successful RTM. Check out Jason Perlow’s article for a more in-depth look at Windows Server 2008 R2.
And don’t forget Windows 7 – check out Nigel Dessau’s recent blog to read more about how Windows 7 combined with the upcoming DirectX 11-enabled ATI RadeonTM graphics cards will help deliver what we at AMD like to call The Ultimate Visual ExperienceTM. Another good read is Matt Kimball’s blog on Windows 7 virtualization capabilities.
Margaret Lewis (@margaretjlewis) is a Product Marketing Director at AMD.
Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
Unleashing high performance applications with AMD and VMware
Posted by Julie Lass in 1:09 PM
We all count on Moore’s Law to make our lives easier every time we upgrade to the next generation of computing systems, but we sometimes forget that there’s a lot of hard work that goes into improving the performance of our hardware and software.
I’m John Troyer from VMware’s VMTN Blog. For AMD’s Virtualization Ecosystem Month, I thought I’d talk about the recent performance testing we’ve seen with the 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor (codenamed “Shanghai”) and how VMware Virtual Infrastructure can unleash your applications to take full advantage of your new hardware.
First of all, these processors are fast. Here is some background on VMmark from our VROOM! Blog:
VMmark is a benchmark intended to measure the performance of virtualization environments in an effort to allow customers to compare platforms. It is also useful in studying the effect of architectural features. VMmark consists of six workloads (Web, File, Database, Java, Mail and Standby servers). Multiple sets of workloads (tiles) can be added to scale the benchmark load to match the underlying hardware resources. For more information on VMmark see here.
Now take a look at the VMmark Results page: a screen shot of the three current top scoring entries is shown on the right. The Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor Model 8384 is powering all of those top-scoring entries.
One of the reasons these Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors are so fast is that they contain AMD’s Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) technology, which gives hardware support for MMU virtualization. We wrote a white paper showing how VMware ESX takes advantage of RVI, including a 29% increase in performance with Citrix XenApp; and in a recent study on our VROOM! blog, we showed RVI boosting VMmark performance boost by as much as 17%.
These processors are fast, but can your application take advantage of them? Many applications can’t utilize all the cores of modern CPUs. We tested the ability of the Apache web server to scale up and use more CPU cores using th
e web performance benchmark SPECweb®2005. Even using 8 processors, .However, if you scale out with VMware Virtual Infrastructure using multiple virtual machines, all running a web server, you can scale to take advantage of all 8 cores.Apache on a native, non-virtualization system only delivered 1.85x the performance of a single processor
We decided to show this by creating a rocket car and setting a land speed record. We documented how we built our web serving rocket car on an HP ProLiant DL585 G5 with four Quad-Core AMD Opteron Model 8382 processors. This setup achieved the highest SPEC®web2005 result ever on a 16-core system. Now, there are cheaper ways to move this many transactions on a virtual platform, but we weren’t building a cargo-hauling truck, we were building a race car to prove a point – scaling out with virtual machine building blocks is the best way to overcome multi-core scaling limitations of current applications.
Check out the eye-opening graphs in Scott Drummond’s blog post showing how your application running in a native environment probably will (or won’t) scale over the next few years and how a virtual building block architecture can help you take advantage of the newest generation of processors. VMware will continue to work together with AMD to help unleash the power of your high performance applications with virtualization.
John Troyer manages VMware’s blogging and social media programs.His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Any claims made herein have not been independently verified by AMD. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
SPEC and SPECweb are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation.
Celebrate Virtualization
Posted by Nigel Dessau in 2:46 AM
In a blog in October I noted that in 2009 we expect virtualization to cross the chasm. Since then there has been a lot of news that underscores this point, not the least of which is that Citrix’s XenServer is now free. Maybe what Sun did for clients with VirtualBox, Citrix will do for servers. We applaud this at AMD because we believe in a competitive market.
And we want you to know what we have been doing at AMD to help drive innovation in this market.
To that end we want to celebrate our leadership in hardware-assisted virtualization technology as well as our ongoing collaboration with our ecosystem of virtualization partners by declaring March “Virtualization Ecosystem Month.” Throughout the month, AMD and our virtualization software partners, including Citrix, Microsoft, Oracle, Novell, Parallels, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, Virtual Iron and VMware, will participate in activities to drive awareness about each partner’s important role in the evolution of virtualization technology.
Why?
The goals of Virtualization Ecosystem Month are to do more than drive awareness about the evolution of virtualization, they are to foster a better understanding about the complex, evolving demands placed on today’s data centers — and to show appreciation for the dedicated IT professionals managing this technology progression. As virtualization is becoming a mainstream technology for businesses of all sizes, virtualization software vendors play a crucial role by providing varied perspectives on the opportunities and challenges customers face when deploying the technology. Virtualization Ecosystem Month is designed to highlight these partner perspectives.
Where?
During March look for online activities including:
- A Webcasted virtualization partner panel on March 25, 2009
- Frequent guest blog posts from partners on AMD’s virtualization blog
- Regular virtualization updates on Twitter and Facebook from our partners
- Twitter updates from AMD’s Margaret Lewis
- New information and resources on AMD’s virtualization site
- Additional virtualization videos on AMD’s YouTube channel
- Guest posts by Margaret Lewis on partner blogs
As Margaret puts it, “AMD has always valued the collaborative relationship we have with our software partners, and we believe these partnerships contribute to the health of the virtualization industry.”
That sounds like something to celebrate to me!
Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.
IDC Cloud Computing Forum: Panelists, Editors, Clouds and Fog
Posted by Margaret Lewis in 2:06 PM
I am back in Texas after attending the IDC Cloud Computing Forum in San Francisco last week. My big take away from my trip to the Bay Area: the concept of Cloud Computing as a delivery mechanism for applications, data, and services is gaining some serious traction. We recorded video from the panel AMD hosted, and you will be able to see and hear the discussion around these issues for yourself once we post clips from the event to amd.com.
The IDC Cloud Computing Forum was an excellent venue to dissect this technology. A surprising fact: the event drew a larger-than-anticipated crowd even in tight economic times. We saw the same phenomena earlier this month at the Parallels Summit, another conference that focused on Cloud Computing, as reported by my colleague Neil Kelly.
Security and interoperability were major concerns raised by the audience during the panel AMD hosted and Frank Gens from IDC moderated – which included participants from Accenture, Adobe, Amazon, Red Hat, and The Shumacher Group. Our lively security discussion raised the idea that cloud computing can provide equal to or better security than some of today’s IT environments. A more detailed discussion on Cloud Computing security from the conference can be found in a PCWorld article by James Niccolai
In terms of the interoperability of emerging cloud computing environment, Charlie Babcock of Information Week put the panel on notice with his question “why it was necessary for every hypervisor vendor to launch its own virtual machine runtime format?” As is often the case with emerging technology, innovation comes first and standardization follows. Not very customer centric – but as I pointed out during the panel our virtualization software partners are working together in a more open and timely fashion than I have seen with other technology advances. In fact, I blogged about this topic, as it relates to the Red Hat-Microsoft announcement, last week.
In an interesting turn of events, Intel’s speaker at the conference, Jason Waxman was more cautious regarding cloud computing, and maintained it can be done very well without the use of virtualization. Personally I don’t see it the same way, and I’m wondering if Waxman is aware that Microsoft’s Windows Azure Services Platform effectively uses virtualization technology. He may not, as this technology was developed using the AMD Opteron processor (specifically because of our second level address translation or Rapid Virtualization Indexing).
Unfortunately my trip meant I missed seeing the first demo of “Istanbul” – our 6 core processor due in 2H09. http://techreport.com/articles.x/16448 Note that Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V was up and running a mixture of Windows and Linux virtual machines. The “HT Assist” feature of Istanbul is looking good and promises to help increase performance and efficiency in memory-intensive environments like virtualization. These two events highlight the importance of staying involved with trends on the horizon while continuing to test the boundaries of technologies customers are increasingly adopting today.
Margaret Lewis is a Product Marketing Director at AMD. Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
Drawing Parallels in Vegas
Posted by Neil Kelly in 1:00 AM
First of all, I’d like to take a moment to thank Margaret Lewis for letting me use her blog as an outlet to flex my blogging muscles. I am just back from the Parallels Summit in Las Vegas and to say it was a great show would be an understatement. While a lot of conferences are experiencing reduced attendance this year, the Parallels conference actually doubled attendance over last year.
Parallels, a worldwide leader in automation and virtualization software that optimizes computing for consumers, businesses, and service providers, and a valued AMD technology partner, each year hosts this Summit to discuss the virtualization trends affecting tech companies and how they will impact businesses over the coming year.
I think it’s always fun to hear from people who are using our products - and for me, the Parallels Summit was a great opportunity to speak directly with customers. A highlight was meeting Jörg Lennhof, Senior Produkmanager at 1&1 Internet AG, who has deployed tens of thousands of AMD Opteron™ processor-based servers! It was interesting to learn that they’re still using older AMD Opteron processor-based systems side by side with the new by offering value services on legacy systems for student customers.
I had a chance to talk to a number of attendees about our recent release last week of the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron HE processors, our new 55-watt ACP part, and I could just tell these guys get it. They realize that some customers don’t need or want our fastest and hottest (and most expensive) processors when their average load may average 50-60% -they need an efficient processor that consumes less power and is reliable. The bottom line - AMD works for them because we drive innovation that solves their business problem.
AMD not only works for attendees of Parallels Summit, it works for Parallels itself. I had a chance to meet with Nick Dobrovolskiy, VP of product development at Parallels, to talk about their new bare metal server hypervisor, named Parallels Server, and to see a demo of their soon to be released Workstation update. He told me that server development continues to go well and he and his team are having a great experience with AMD Virtualization™ (AMD-V™) technology. At AMD, we’re looking forward to the release of the Parallels Server; we expect it to be a great tool and a great fit for AMD processor-based servers.
While the show was a bit of a whirlwind, I came home feeling proud to work for AMD. It’s kinda cool to know we’ve made the right product and technology decisions to help our customers and our industry partners weather these tough economic times.
Neil Kelly is the Director of Developer Relations at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
(4.67 out of 5)