How many times have we heard that a pocket calculator today has the computing power that put a man on the moon in 1969?  I can remember my father, who was an engineer, showing me how to use a slide rule when I was growing up (sorry dad, I cheat these days and use a computer.)

Not that long ago, supercomputers were large room-sized behemoths that could require hundreds of millions of dollars of investment and could crack complicated problems.  Then everything changed.  I blame Linux, but you can choose your own hero (or villain).  Suddenly the world of supercomputing went, almost overnight, from a very expensive proprietary and exclusionary world, to an open environment where people use industry-standard hardware and open source software components to construct massive supercomputers at a fraction of their previous cost.

With these supercomputers, companies, universities or governments can take a large problem, like where to drill that hole in the ground to find oil, break it up into thousands of tasks, disperse them across all the computing nodes and then compile the answer.  When it can cost up to $1M US to put that hole in the ground, a supercomputer is money well spent.

I am in Tokyo, on vacation this week, but I remember a very vivid meeting here back in the early 90’s at a Japanese auto manufacturer. They were trying to figure out how to drive down the cost of crash simulation.  Apparently it is a lot cheaper if you don’t have to build a car and then drive it into a wall.  Today crash simulation is primarily done with computers.  You can crash more cars in a morning with an HPC cluster than in a year’s worth of playing bumper cars on the Dan Ryan Expressway. Those of you from Chicago know why I picked the Ryan – it was notorious for accidents.

It is currently the rainy season in Japan, and every time I turn on the TV to see how wet we will get today, I am reminded about the accuracy of weather forecasts (insert your own joke here), another area where HPC clusters and supercomputing technology are having major impact.

The ability to lash hundreds or even thousands of low-cost x86 servers together into a supercomputer is presenting some pretty amazing results. In the most recent TOP500 Supercomputers, AMD continues to be prominently featured as a groundbreaking leader.

With the top two overall supercomputers on the www.top500.org list based on AMD technology, and 9 out of the top 20, it is clear that customers are very interested in AMD Opteron™ processors for building high performance supercomputers and for good reason.

The chief concerns for most supercomputer customers these days, believe it or not, are generally not raw performance numbers.  When you are putting thousands of processors together, a few percentage points here or there become meaningless.  The factors that do drive a lot of the decisions are price, power consumption and scalability. 

Think about the task.  You are building out thousands of servers, each with multiple processors.  For every dollar that you save per processor, you might be saving tens of thousands of dollars in total cost. Many supercomputing sites are frankly operating in tough budget constraints, especially when it’s an academic institution, for example.  And power can’t be overlooked.  The density of these deployments, along with the networking, can consume huge amounts of power.  Scalability is a given, with the large number of pieces that you are breaking a problem into in order to solve.

What makes AMD Opteron processors perfect for supercomputing? Well we excel in these three areas: power, price and scalability.  And, only AMD can give you the same 6-core processor architecture in 2P, 4P and 8P configurations, helping you achieve greater scalability.  And too, when you want to talk about HPC performance, you can’t ignore that throughput and memory performance are key.  Those are also areas where Direct Connect Architecture has and continues to excel.

That is why you see us all over the TOP500 list.  And with our 6-core “Istanbul” product now in the market, who knows what November’s list will look like?

John Fruehe is the Director of Business Development for Server/Workstation products 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.