Posts tagged with Cray
Faster Supercomputing Cats Fueled by Six-Core AMD Opteron™ Processors
Posted by John Fruehe in 4:10 pm
Loading ...In the June 2009 TOP 500 list, the Oak Ridge National Labs’ “Jaguar” system was #2, edging close behind the “Roadrunner” cluster and was the first wholly x86 system to achieve a petaflop in performance. Of course, both utilize AMD Opteron processors to reach their record shattering performance.
However, this summer, Oak Ridge embarked on a project to increase their capacity and performance – an upgrade of the 37,000 processors in the cluster to Six-Core AMD Opteron processors.
Because of AMD’s consistent platform strategy, with processor commonality and common sockets, the task was remarkably simple. It took approximately 5 minutes per 8P server module to do the upgrade. (Watch the upgrade here.)
When we developed the Socket F (1207), we anticipated a long life for the socket. As a matter of fact, we anticipate that socket living through the end of 2010. Customers who have standardized on products based on those processors will probably want some consistency across their data centers. And customers that have built out capacity on those platforms might want to upgrade, something that is easy and painless for our customers. Contrast this with our competitor’s “tick tock” approach – which threatens a continual pace of disruption.
With this upgrade, “Jaguar” now takes a new spot in the TOP500 list. First. That is one fast cat – and it is purring along on AMD Opteron technology.
Researchers were quickly back online and with this additional performance they now have the ability to solve complex (frankly, mind-boggling) problems faster, in addition to tackling more projects, some that have previously been out of their reach.
To get an understanding of Oak Ridge National Labs’ scientific research and their take on the TOP500, take a look at this video.
John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing 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.
AMD Opteron Processors Scale the Alps
Posted by John Fruehe in 10:49 am
Nestled just north of the Italian border, in southern Switzerland, you will find CSCS, the Swiss National Supercomputing Center. Long known for chocolate and breathtaking Alpine landscape, Switzerland is also known in the supercomputing circles as an HPC powerhouse.
We traveled to Manno, just north of Lugano to meet with some of the brightest minds in HPC, as well as unveil their latest supercomputer, Monte Rosa – named after the Swiss mountain, the tallest in the regional border with their Italian neighbors.
Monte Rosa is based on a Cray XT5 platform, which is quite popular with the supercomputing crowd because of its massively scalable architecture and high-throughput interconnects. Monte Rosa features 14,762 processors, capable of delivering up to 141 teraflops of peak performance.
To complement the huge number of processors, 29.5 terabytes of main system memory are available for computation. Of course you need somewhere to store all of the results, so a 290 terabyte storage system holds the results from processing runs.
With reported performance of nearly 10 times that of its predecessor, the new Monte Rosa is liquid cooled, allowing it to fit in the same physical space, helping to optimize the center’s floorspace.
The system was installed in record time in May of this year, thanks to Cray’s modular engineering efforts, allowing the center to begin immediately reaping the rewards of the system. Within only a few days of bringing the system online, it was already being utilized near its full capacity.
The productivity seen with the new system is expected to help a variety of industries within Switzerland. While this system is based on Quad-Core AMD OpteronTM processors today, there is already a planned upgrade to Six-Core AMD OpteronTM processors before the end of the year, bringing the total performance to over 200 teraflops.
While some computing centers focus on building out capacity, CSCS likes to focus on the applications. They’ve built up an impressive staff of technologists who can not only focus on optimizing the supercomputer platform, but also, spend most of their time in the applications, where they believe they can deliver their true value-add. Science and engineering applications such as climate, weather, biology chemistry, physics and material sciences are all aided by this new cluster.
But that is not to say that they haven’t built out some amazing capacity. Monte Rosa is now the 23rd largest supercomputer in the world and the 4th largest in Europe according to the June 2009 Top 500 list.
With the performance that they are seeing using Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, we can’t wait to see what happens when they are able to increase capacity with the Six-Core AMD Opteron processors.
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.
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.
Rise of the Big Machines
Posted by John Fruehe in 10:00 am
(24 votes, average: 4.29 out of 5)I remember the first rack-based servers at Compaq. The world was ruled by tower servers. We wanted to introduce racks to the x86 world, but we knew that customers were risk averse. We had this great marketing campaign about “the same servers you know and love, now in rack format.” Brilliant, right?
When we went out to test market the idea with focus groups, they all saw the pictures of a full rack and said “No, these are like mainframes. They are much more powerful than servers – they are supercomputers.” And we actually tried to convince them that these weren’t supercomputers, they were the same servers they were used to buying – we’re talking x86, after all.
Then we realized the smart person should play up the idea of being more powerful, because that is what the customer expects. “x86 Supercomputers” -a phrase that we all joked about back in 1994. Fast forward 15 years and what we see now are x86 supercomputers – and the AMD OpteronTM processor has had a large hand in leading the change.
But no company has explored and delivered on the idea of x86 supercomputing more so than Cray, the company that is synonymous with supercomputers.
If you take a look at recent IDC data on the $3M+ segment of the supercomputer market, what you see is that Cray has the leadership position, with 35% of the market. Their penetration into defense, academia and research is legendary, but Cray is increasingly present in the corporate world as well. With the XT3, XT4 and now XT5 systems, Cray has been able to build highly scalable, highly parallel supercomputers by innovating around industry-standard components like AMD Opteron processors.
Through their high speed bus architecture and meticulous engineering, they have managed to achieve key wins on the worldwide Top 500 supercomputer list year after year., with one third of the Top 15, all based on Cray systems featuring AMD Technology:
- #2 Oak Ridge National Laboratory
- #6 National Institute for Computational Sciences/University of Tennessee
- #11 NERSC/LBNL
- #12 Oak Ridge National Laboratory
- #13 NNSA/Sandia National Laboratories
Of course, the folks at Cray will tell you (and they’d be right) that the most important aspect of these systems – and all the others they have deployed through the years around the globe – is the real-world work that’s achieved when they’re in action.
This week Cray announced two major pieces of news. First, the #2 supercomputer in the world, the “Jaguar” system at ORNL will be upgraded to a 2 Petaflop system by replacing the existing quad-core processors with AMD’s latest six-core processor. A total of around 225,000 processor cores if you are doing the math. In addition, NERSC, the holder of the current #11 system, will also be adding a new Cray XT5 system with 1 Petaflop of performance.
Congratulations to the team at Cray, their execution in the world of supercomputing is second to none.
When I look back on those Compaq customers that were telling me that the shiny new racks of x86 servers were really supercomputers, I have to admit that they were 100% right. They just didn’t know how visionary they were back then.
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.
Building Blocks
Posted by John Fruehe in 7:45 am
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.
Breaking New Ground: The Six-Core AMD Opteron™ Processor
Posted by Guest Blogger in 11:13 am
Cray has a long and distinguished history of providing high performance computing technologies that allow our customers to push the frontiers of science and engineering. Modern Cray systems do this by providing the world’s most scalable, general purpose supercomputing system for science, the Cray XT5. At the heart of the XT5 are four key legs of scalable performance: the processor, the network, the infrastructure and the software. Today, we welcome the introduction of a processor that breaks new ground in scalability, the Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processor.
We have been enthusiastically preparing for the arrival of AMD’s new processor, and we are pleased to be able offer both our new and existing customers a tremendous step forward in terms of performance, efficiency, price-performance and energy optimization. Simply put, our customers are going to love the level of scalability this processor provides.
The Cray XT series of supercomputers, including the Cray XT5 and the recently introduced Cray XT5m, equipped with this processor will feature a groundbreaking 12 cores per dual-socket computational node. The XT5m system, affectionately known as the “Mighty Mini,” will provide a powerful 1,000 to 6,000 AMD Opteron processor cores in a single cost-effective, scalable and fully upgradeable mid-ranged system. With 10 to 60 teraflops in this mid-ranged system, this is certainly not your father’s mid-ranged supercomputer. The even more powerful Cray XT5 systems will provide virtually limitless scalability, ranging from 1,000 to more than 300,000 AMD Opteron processor cores in a fully scalable hardware and software infrastructure.
Since we design our infrastructure for ease of upgradeability, our existing Cray XT5 customers can easily install the new six-core processor in their current systems with a simple processor swap and BIOS update. We have successfully migrated customers though four generations of AMD Opteron processor technology, from 1 to 2 to 4 and now to 6 AMD Opteron processor cores per socket and navigated the large system scalability challenges of each generation.
Our years of experience with these large HPC systems allows us to provide a proven, multi-core software environment that can take full advantage of this six-fold increase in scalability. Our software, including the Cray Linux Environment (CLE) and Cray Programming Environment (CPE) masks the growing complexities of this multi-core environment and provides users and administrators a unified environment that is different from the standard “cluster” experience.
What does this new Six-Core AMD Opteron processor mean for Cray, its customers and the HPC community?
We have a simple vision of our place in high performance computing. We want “better science” to be Cray’s sign and signature. The Cray XT5, utilizing Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, was the first general purpose system to break the petaflops barrier, providing a platform for groundbreaking science to hundreds of researchers in dozens of disciplines within weeks of installation. This new Six-Core AMD Opteron processor technology from AMD included in our XT5 and XT5m systems will mean more performance at a low cost, superior efficiency and more scalability. It means that researchers, scientists and engineers that utilize Cray supercomputers can now leverage a dramatic increase in computational power to address some of the world’s most challenging and sophisticated problems.
In short, it means “better science” and that is the most important thing of all.
Barry Bolding is Vice President of Scalable Systems at Cray. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Any claims made herein are based on Cray testing and have not been independently verified by AMD
Anticipation
Posted by John Fruehe in 2:22 pm
If you were lucky enough to grow up in the 1970’s, you have to remember Carly Simon singing over a static-filled AM radio that anticipation was “making me late.”
But what if anticipation makes me early? We’ve seen that accurately anticipating customer needs can certainly raise the curtain sooner than expected. What a world we live in.
Customer anticipation over “Istanbul”, AMD’s new six-core AMD OpteronTM processor, is growing every day. Since late last month, when we indicated that the launch was pulling in due to the unprecedented quality of the silicon, the requests have been pouring in. More and more customers are asking when they can get their hands on one of these processors. Soon is all we can say at this point, soon.
The factories are building out parts as we speak and we are ramping up production in anticipation of our launch.
We demonstrated “Istanbul” performance earlier this year , and showed how well it works in a virtualized environment and even showed how systems could be upgraded with amazing speed.
All of this is driving anticipation with our customers, and my team – the main interface between AMD’s system partners and our server division – is constantly fielding the requests for more information, more samples and more customer briefings around these new processors.
We’re pretty excited with how things are shaping up and can’t wait until we can launch the new processor.
The anticipation has been growing, and we’re getting ready to deliver. How much anticipation is out there? Have a listen for yourself. This is Barry Bolding, the Vice President of Scalable Systems at Cray talking about our upcoming processor:
Six cores, six years of AMD Opteron processors. If you look at what we have accomplished in such a short period of time, it’s clear that when we said back in 2003 that we would change the server world forever, we weren’t kidding.
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.
Scalability: It’s a two way street
Posted by Guest Blogger in 2:30 am
It’s pretty tough to have a smart discussion about the history of modern transportation without invoking the name of Henry Ford – an inventor whose name is synonymous with his product category. The same can be said for Seymour Cray and the supercomputer.
Earlier today, Cray (the company) announced something pretty remarkable: a new version of its highly successful Cray XT5™ supercomputer, scaled down for industry and enterprise computing. The Cray XT5 is of course the heart of “Jaguar” – the world’s first x86 supercomputer to cross the Petaflop performance barrier and a stunning testament to the power of the Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor.
What makes this really interesting is how, with slight modifications and careful attention to managing power consumption, this world-leading system can now be more widely deployed in the private sector with the Cray XT5m™. Energy, transportation, circuit design, manufacturing and finance are all markets that can benefit from national lab-caliber computing capability.
With the unique building block nature of AMD’s Direct Connect Architecture, Cray has fashioned several fully elastic system designs that can scale up and out as needed. For example, Cray’s “Red Storm” system has consistently grown in size and computing power to meet the demands of its mission, adding processors and easily moving from single-core to dual- and quad-core over the course of more than five years while remaining in the upper echelons of the TOP500. That’s the kind of long-term deployment that can help private industry to remain competitive and profitable – and the Cray XT5m can deliver.
With its strong foundation in industry-standard x86 processing, massive system scalability and innovative interconnect designs, Cray is well positioned to move everyone onto the Supercomputing highway. And for our part, AMD plans to continue to turbo-charging the engine.
Jeff Underhill is a business development manager for High Performance Computing at AMD. He is also a member of the HyperTransport Technology Consortium Executive Committee and its Ecosystem Chairperson. 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.
