When you’re able to cram 12 individual cores onto a single processor, you’ve got some serious number crunching power at your fingertips. Where this really comes to life is in the area of high performance computing. Some of the world’s most complex challenges – climate change, disease research, new forms of energy – are tackled by supercomputers, and in 2010 we saw many of them implement AMD’s latest 12-core server platforms.

As you might remember, earlier this year SC10 kicked off on the heels of the 36^th edition of the highly anticipated TOP500 list ranking the most powerful supercomputers in the world, in which AMD made one of its most prominent showings to date. Some of AMD’s highlights from the list include:

• 24 of the top 50 systems were using an AMD CPU or GPU
• 59 supercomputers that were listed are currently using the AMD Opteron^TM platform
• 22 systems are based on the new 8 – 12 core AMD Opteron 6000 Series platform
• Leading systems “Jaguar,” “Roadrunner” and “Kraken” currently leverage AMD Opteron processors

While we’re proud of our high position on this list, to us that is less important than the actual challenges these supercomputers are designed to address. Jaguar, for example, helps study supernovas to better understand the universe around us, and is being used to find a way to derive fuel from plant cellulose, among many things

At AMD, we are focused on reaching new performance milestones that will lead the HPC industry toward new frontiers in heterogeneous and exascale computing, thus helping enable more and more breakthroughs.

Have you been keeping up with the 12 days of 12 core so far? If not, you can find our first three days here and check out the complete contest rules here.

Julie Lass is a Senior Public Relations Manager 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.