Last week, Appro and Lockheed Martin announced the exciting news that – utilizing AMD Opteron^TM 6100 Series processors – they have been awarded a deal with the Department of Defense for an impressive new 1.475 teraflop supercomputer. World class supercomputing power such as this is certainly interesting unto itself, but it raises a bigger issue.

This effort is part of the Department of Defense’s High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP). In essence, this is a program developed to ensure the DoD is getting the most out of the advances in high performance computing. This is technology that has an incredible impact on the work they do day in and day out. Work that includes advanced simulations to ensure national security and complex research into issues such as long-term weather testing to better plan humanitarian and military operations around the world.

The U.S. Government has long been one of the major drivers of High Performance Computing (HPC), but governments in many regions around the world are increasing their focus and investments in supercomputing to help researchers address increasingly complex challenges.   Defense and aerospace continue to be important areas of focus, but at AMD, we are seeing growth in other areas of the public sector, such as education and life sciences, as well as optimizing public services.

For example, Goethe University Frankfurt made a huge splash at SC10 this year, emerging with one of the top 25 fast supercomputers in the world, not to mention a high placement on the 2010‘s Green500 list as well. What’s especially interesting is that this is an HPC deployment that leverages both AMD CPUs and GPUs – a trend we’re seeing more and more lately.

AMD has seen an increased investment in HPC locally as well. Working with the city of Austin, which provides 50 billion gallons water to its customers annually, AMD Opteron^TM processor-based Dell servers have helped the City of Austin Water Utility increase the capacity of its operation without increasing its carbon footprint and the associated environmental, societal and economic costs.

Oftentimes, we only think of supercomputers as expensive machines locked away in research institutions. But, the reality is that supercomputers come in a wide range of sizes, price points, applications and deployments, and they are increasingly part of mainstream operations for public and private organizations. Each day we hear about new and exciting supercomputing-enabled research and the practical applications and solutions they are delivering.  We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section about how you see HPC evolving and interesting applications that are helping address major challenges and change our world for the better.

Are you keeping up with the 12 Days of 12 Core? Check out prior blog posts here, and get the full guidelines for how to win a Toshiba laptop here.

Steve Kester is a Director of US Government Affairs at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.