When you come from Austin, TX, talking about the weather can take up a significant portion of one’s summer.  Consider this year’s intense drought and more than sixty days of 100+ degree heat.  You can bet that had folks in my home town talking.  Now that my family has completed our move to Singapore for my new role leading AMD’s APAC region sales and marketing, we’re looking at an altogether new weather scenario – one that includes monsoon seasons and no shortage of rainfall.

Which brings me to the news here.  Cray, one of AMD’s most strategic technology partners, has just announced a large, long-term contract with the Korean Meteorological Administration.  KMA is one of the world’s foremost weather forecasting and climate research centers. Included in the contract is  the Earth System Research Center (ESRC) – a cooperative program bringing together weather modeling expertise across the East-Asia Pacific region and exporting those learnings globally.  Certainly some of the challenges for forecasters are unique to this region, such as typhoon and tsunami prediction, while others are more broad – earthquakes and climate change.

HPC customers (and enterprise server customers for that matter) encounter something similar:  problems that are unique to their individual situation combined with the challenges that are universal to server computing.  I believe that Cray does a phenomenal job of helping their customers address each.  Their extensive line of supercomputers are based on the flexible, high-performing and low-power AMD Opteron^TM processor and the combined architecture delivers phenomenal sustained application performance, reliability and ease of management.

But Cray also looks at each customer individually and helps address their particular challenges and goals for the long-term.  With KMA, Cray has announced they will be providing services and application support.  With the “Jaguar” system at Oak Ridge National Lab, they are embarking on a significant upgrade, taking the world’s highest performing wholly x86 supercomputer to the next level with the new Six-Core AMD Opteron processor.

I congratulate my colleagues here in APAC, as well as Cray, KMA, and the ESRC on a technology partnership that along with AMD, advances global science.  I’ll be watching to see the developments of their research and near-term, I’m looking forward to learning new weather patterns that include some rain.

Ben Williams is AMD’s corporate vice president and general manager for AMD Asia Pacific. 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.