Posts tagged with High Performance Computing
“Istanbul” – The HPCWire Reader’s Choice
Posted by John Fruehe in 3:39 pm
Loading ...This week, at the SuperComputing 2009 event, AMD received the HPCWire Reader’s Choice Award for our Six Core AMD Opteron™ Processor (the one you know as “Istanbul.”)
When you consider that two of the largest High Performance Computing systems in the world (Oak Ridge’s “Jaguar” and the University of Tennessee’s “Kraken”) were recently and simply upgraded from their quad-core processors to six core processors and got a sizeable boost in performance, to put it mildly, it probably wouldn’t be a shock to hear that we were recognized by the HPC community.
What makes this award great is not that we are being recognized, but the fact that this is a reader’s choice award. When we get a press award, it’s great; but when the readers decide that we deserve recognition, that’s another story.
In the HPC world, flash and advertising won’t cut it. These are the men and women who slave over huge systems, trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of them. They appreciate performance, but they also really appreciate consistency and simplicity – those help them focus on the task at hand – designing alternative energy sources, predicting weather and climate change, developing the next breakthrough drug, or analyzing crash data to make our transportation systems safer.
Knowing that these folks find our product outstanding means the world to AMD, because we build the AMD Opteron processor for them.
So, Margaret, be sure to bring that award home, we’ll try to clear some room in the trophy case. While we are in there, maybe we need to expand it a bit, because with 12-core processors with 4 channels of memory on the horizon, we might need some extra space.
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.
Faster Supercomputing Cats Fueled by Six-Core AMD Opteron™ Processors
Posted by John Fruehe in 4:10 pm
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.