Archive for the category Guest Bloggers
Energy Efficiency Globally Must Start Locally
Posted by Guest Blogger in 2:02 pm
(3 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5)
Loading ...New York State is currently facing some difficult challenges including rising energy prices, an aging electricity delivery infrastructure, an imbalanced electricity generation portfolio and climate change. According to a 2007 EPA study conducted by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and sponsored by AMD, New York’s data centers – home to second largest concentration of data centers in the country – consume an average 4.5 billion kilowatt hours a year. This is the equivalent of nearly 700,000 single family homes with a year’s supply of electricity — at a cost of roughly $594 million. To meet these challenges, energy efficiency must play a central role in reducing consumption and improving reliability.
With that in mind, NYSERDA, AMD, New York State, HP and GLOBALFOUNDRIES have all come together to address these issues head on, discussing them at the latest NY State Performance Computing Seminar on October 28.
The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), in collaboration with AMD, have been instrumental in driving sustainable computing and business practices in New York. Improvements in operating practices, coupled with installation of energy efficient systems, can enable significant energy savings and help reduce the strain information technology and data centers place on the electric grid while helping to ensure a reliable and affordable supply of electricity. In addition, by improving the energy efficiency of data centers and working in synergy with NYSERDA and AMD, New York State and its IT businesses and data centers can make considerable strides toward achieving their respective energy and environmental goals, while supporting economic development in this growing industry. More importantly, investments in energy efficient systems can help improve a data centers’ bottom line.
NYSERDA’s Industrial and Process Efficiency program plans to invest more than $100 million over the next three years in new and existing manufacturing and data center facilities that help reduce energy consumption. These funds can encourage sustainable load growth and help to significantly reduce the use of electricity and natural gas.
For more information, visit www.nyserda.org
Sal Graven is a Technical Information Associate at the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA)
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.
Let’s Talk About the Weather
Posted by Guest Blogger in 9:09 am
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 OpteronTM 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.
Energy Efficient Four-Socket Servers – REALLY?
Posted by Andy Parma in 9:27 pm
As VMworld 2009 approaches, I’ve been thinking about virtualization and energy efficiency and how they apply to four-socket servers. I know what you’re thinking – isn’t an energy efficient four-socket server an oxymoron like a hybrid SUV?
First, let’s take a closer look at how IT managers are actually using four-socket servers. It’s very rare for four-socket servers to be used strictly as a way to increase compute density. Appro and SGI have twin servers and half-depth servers to serve this purpose. In most cases, four-socket servers are used for applications that require a single server to have access to large amounts of memory. These applications typically consist of database, virtualization/consolidation, and some high performance computing applications. With the ability to support 32 memory DIMMs per server, optimized virtualization features such as AMD VirtualizationTM (AMD-VTM) technology, and unique energy efficiency features (AMD-P), Six-Core AMD OpteronTM 8400 series processors are ideal for these applications.
When comparing the feature sets of Six-Core AMD OpteronTM 8400 series processors and Intel Xeon 7400 series (”Dunnington”) processors, the feature set consistency of the AMD OpteronTM 8400 series processors is in stark contrast to the Intel Xeon 7400 series offerings. Four items about the Xeon 7400 series stand out:
- The feature set differs dramatically between each of the seven models in the Xeon 7400 series
- No Xeon 7400 series processor includes RVI or Tagged TLB virtualization features
- The low-power Xeon L7445 and L7455 do NOT include the same energy efficiency features as the highest performance Xeon X7460
- All Xeon 7400 series processors use Fully Buffered DIMM (FB-DIMM) memory
The feature set consistency of the AMD OpteronTM 8400 series processors gives customers a more predictable approach to data center planning and helps capacity planning, software image development, and validation efforts.
What about the performance and value of servers using these processors? If servers using Intel processors are clearly superior, then the differing feature sets won’t matter, right?
While the 46% VMmark performance advantage that a four-socket AMD OpteronTM 8400 series processor-based server has over the top-performing four-socket Intel Xeon 7400 series processor-based server is impressive, I think that the performance of energy efficient Six-Core AMD OpteronTM 8425 HE processor-based servers is even more impressive. This comparison shows that, depending on benchmark, a server using low-power Six-Core AMD OpteronTM processors can provide nearly double the server performance of a server using low-power Hex-Core Intel Xeon L7455 processors at nearly half the processor price. Servers using low-power Six-Core AMD OpteronTM 8425 HE processors even significantly outperform servers using the highest performance, highest power Hex Core Intel Xeon X7460 processors, again at nearly half the processor price.
When combined, all of these advantages (superior performance, energy efficiency, virtualization features, and pricing) make the Six-Core AMD Opteron 8400 series processors the ideal solution for four-socket servers.
Now, let’s go back to my original analogy about the hybrid SUV. In theory, the reason that people buy an SUV is because they need to move a lot of stuff, whether that’s people, groceries, or furniture. It’s the same way with four-socket servers – people buy a four-socket server because they need lots of memory to process lots of stuff, whether that’s database applications, virtualization/consolidation, or processing large datasets in high performance computing applications. Why shouldn’t you able to process lots of “stuff” and get energy efficiency too?
Andy Parma is a Product Marketing Manager 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.
A Safe Bet
Posted by Guest Blogger in 10:37 pm
It’s already August and I’ve been giving some thought to a last quick summer get-away. Been to Las Vegas recently? It’s an astoundingly popular destination – more than 37 million visitors last year! And most of them began and ended their trip with the ubiquitous ringing sound of the slot machines. (On second thought, I may be looking for something a bit more low-key.)
But let me share a secret – many of those gaming machines folks pass on the way to baggage claim, the buffet or the blackjack table feature an AMD processor. Slot machines are one category of many so-called embedded systems that require massive compute power, extreme reliability and absolutely must be efficient to design, manufacture, and operate.
As Vegas has gone electronic, along with our cars, calendars and airport check-in, the number of CPU encounters the average person has in a day is astounding and growing. And many of those processors behind the curtain are of the same power-sipping AMD variety as the processors found in servers in your office or the laptop at home.
AMD has played a significant role in the embedded world since its inception and with input from our customers. We’ve developed a roadmap of high-performance processor, GPU or chipset options that can power everything from a six nines reliability telecom server to a notebook rugged enough to use on an oilfield platform, to a control switch on an assembly line.
Today, we have announced two new dual-core options for our ASB1 BGA platform. They deliver superior performance to an embedded platform that is already being deployed in thin clients, digital signage and you guessed it – gaming machines.
In my 20+ years working in various embedded markets, I’ve learned that a valuable dialog is one to one with system designers. So I look forward to sharing more on this blog about AMD’s role in the embedded realm and especially hearing from the embedded design community on how we can help you achieve a vision for the next ubiquitous, game-changing product. Hit me in the comments.
Buddy Broeker is AMD’s Director of Embedded Computing Solutions. 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.
Working at the Speed of Thought
Posted by Janet Matsuda in 11:47 am
Courtesy of StudioGPU
For professionals working in 3D CAD, Digital Content Creation and Engineering, waiting for designs and images to render is standard operating procedure. While technology has vastly improved over the last several years, many professionals are still waiting several minutes or even hours for large and complex models to render — thankfully rendering overnight is becoming a thing of the past.
In addition, every time a change is made to the model you have to wait for it to render again. While render times are getting shorter, those minutes of waiting can really add up throughout the work week, impacting creativity and productivity.
Considering the human brain works faster than the fastest computer, working at 100 million MIPS (millions of instructions per second), having a computer that could work at the speed of thought would free up professionals to focus on their creation by enabling real-time workflows and rendering. Artists want their creativity to flow with no impediments. The computer should be a tool that responds with interactivity, and the user should not need to wait for the computer to catch up or interrupt their creative flow. While the concept may seem futuristic, there are companies out there making it a reality today.
StudioGPU, an AMD customer, is reinventing 3D visualization workflow by putting the power of real-time graphics processing and rendering on the desktop. Its MachStudio Pro software complements existing design, modeling and animation software by significantly reducing the time and cost to produce CG images. With MachStudio, users can render complex models, scenes and images incredibly quickly – in just a few seconds in many cases.
The benefits of real-time workflows and rendering are significant. Not only can professionals focus on creating, they can get more work done in a shorter period of time. Real-time rendering can also allow professional firms to show customers how proposed changes to a model will look/interact in real-time. And it can enable more accurate designs before moving onto full-scale production, which can help save time and money.
Janet Matsuda is Senior Director, Professional Graphics 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.
Is a Cloud a Cluster or is a Cluster a Cloud?
Posted by Guest Blogger in 10:55 pm
With the recent publication of several articles about using cloud computing concepts for High Performance Computing applications (here and here), I’ve been wondering about the applications for high-performance, low-power processors. There’s been quite a bit written here already about cloud computing and energy efficiency, but what about applications where high performance and energy efficiency are both important?
At this time last year, the most energy efficient AMD OpteronTM processor-based server (based on the SPECpowerTM_ssj benchmark) could achieve only a score of 203 overall ssj_ops/watt (95,853 ssj_ops & 276W @ 100% target load) and consumed 164W at Active Idle. A server using the newest Six-Core AMD Opteron HE processor achieved a score of 1228 overall ssj_ops/watt (419,277 ssj_ops & 221W @ 100% target load) and consumed only 120W at Active Idle1. That’s more than 6x the performance-per-watt AND more than a 25% drop in Active Idle power.
AMD technology-based servers help increase performance-per-watt and decrease power consumption at the same time by using a suite of features we call AMD-P. AMD-P is supported by the Six-Core AMD Opteron 2400 and 8400 Series processors as well as the Quad-Core AMD Opteron 2300 and 8300 Series processors. This suite of features and the large number or processors that support them enable customers to build energy efficient two-socket, four-socket, and eight-socket servers which can efficiently meet the needs of almost any server application.
When we compare servers using the newest Six-Core AMD Opteron 2400 Series HE processors to servers using existing AMD Opteron processors, we find that a server based on the AMD Opteron 2400 Series HE processor is able to achieve 18% higher performance-per-watt than a server using Quad-Core AMD Opteron 2300 Series HE processors2 and also consumes 18% lower platform-level power than a server using Six-Core AMD Opteron 2400 Series processors3.
That’s a pretty big improvement over a processor that was released just six months ago!
In addition to lowering server Active Idle power and boosting server performance-per-watt, these new Six-Core AMD Opteron HE processors are designed to provide significantly more processing performance than prior low-power AMD Opteron processors. Servers using these processors are able to achieve up to 50% higher performance than servers using Quad-Core AMD Opteron 2300 Series HE and 8300 Series HE processors in the same power and thermal envelope. That’s like getting the performance of V6-powered Ford Mustang and the fuel efficiency of a four-cylinder Ford Fusion in the same car.
Whether they’re being used in a cloud cluster or a High Performance Computing cluster, the newest AMD Opteron HE processors provide plenty of performance for only a few watts.
What do you think – is a cloud a cluster or is a cluster a cloud?
Andy Parma is a Product Marketing Manager 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.
1Configuration Information: 2 x Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processors (“Istanbul”) Model 2425 HE in Supermicro 1021M-UR+ server, 16GB (4×4GB DDR2-800) memory, 500GB SATA disk drive, Coldwatt CWA2-0650-10-SM01 power supply, Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008 Enterprise Edition SP1 64-bit
2Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processor Model 2425 HE [SPECpower_ssj™2008 1228 overall ssj_ops/watt, 419,277 ssj_ops, 221W @ 100% target load] compared to Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor Model 2376 HE [SPECpower_ssj™2008 1044 overall ssj_ops/watt, 346,326 ssj_ops, 210W @ 100% target load]
3Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processor Model 2425 HE [SPECpower_ssj™2008 1228 overall ssj_ops/watt, 419,277 ssj_ops, 221W @ 100% target load] compared to Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processor Model 2435 [SPECpower_ssj™2008 1228 overall ssj_ops/watt, 487, 764 ssj_ops, 270W @ 100% target load]
SPEC and the benchmark name SPECpower_ssj are trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. For the latest SPECpower_ssj2008 benchmark results, visit http://www.spec.org/power_ssj2008.
Conspicuous Consumption is Out of Style
Posted by Guest Blogger in 4:24 pm
(2 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)Even before the black clouds of recession began hanging over all our heads, cost effective IT productivity has been in vogue. Doing more with less is the name of the game in the data center. Dell’s Energy Smart platforms aim to do just that by optimizing both IT productivity (or IT performance) and energy consumption (or OpEx). Dell engineers work at this with the same fervor you would expect from a Toyota Prius engineer. We’ve made significant improvements in the system-level efficiency including the development of high-efficiency power supplies, enhanced airflow and fine tuned the dynamic resource management within the server.
At the data center level, it is clear that addressing the energy efficiency of the IT equipment is a critical first step, but it’s not the whole solution. Our focus continues to be an inside-out approach to achieving a sustainable balance between performance and consumption. Combining Energy Smart technologies with the practice of purging unused or underutilized equipment, increasing server utilization through deploying virtualization and adopting intelligent policies and practices will ultimately go a long way in achieving the right balance. The “Greenest” data center is not the one that most efficiently delivers power to the IT equipment, but, instead, the one that manages to make the best use of the IT equipment it has commissioned.
Dell’s collaboration with AMD works so well because we share a focus on striking the right balance between performance and energy consumption. During the last couple of years, our combined efforts have pushed the envelope in responding to ever increasing demands for greater performance while actually lowering the power consumed. For example, the Dell PowerEdge Energy Smart 2970 with the Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ HE processor delivers great performance per watt. Conspicuous energy consumption is definitely out of fashion. AMD and Dell have got you covered.
Daniel Bounds is Senior Manager of Power and Cooling Solutions for Dell. 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.