With current Middle East tensions, fuel prices have been creeping up.  But one South Carolina trucking company found a way to increase their gas mileage for their fleet through the help of the Jaguar supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Lab.

Jaguar, as you may recall, is based on 37,000 six-core AMD Opteron processors. These processors were codenamed “Istanbul,” and they are installed in a huge scalable cluster from Cray. These 220,000+ processor cores helped analyze airflow for BMI’s trucks and save 7-12% in fuel costs.  With fuel prices headed north, that’s a smart decision that will pay benefits well into the future.

For more about how this all came together, check out the story at RDmag: http://www.rdmag.com/News/2011/02/Information-Tech-ORNL-Jaguar-helps-BMI-win-award-nation-save-fuel/

And someone please remind me to fill my tank before I head off to Buenos Aires next week.

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server, Embedded and FireStream products 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.

AMD has long been a fixture in the HPC world.  Some of the fastest supercomputers are built on AMD technology, including the current #1 system Oak Ridge National Labs’ Jaguar cluster which is built on 37,000 six core AMD Opteron™ processors. But not every HPC cluster is this size.  As a matter of fact, from a market perspective, it’s the emergence of smaller clusters that has AMD very interested these days.

With our new AMD Opteron 6000 and 4000 Series platforms, we have leaped forward in delivering the kinds of features that the new Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 will help customers take advantage of.

As the market for HPC technology goes from the bleeding edge to mainstream, more companies and public organizations are finding the need not for massive petaflop clusters, but for smaller, more manageable clusters – the kind that can fit inside their research grant or their R&D budget. This emergence of HPC into the mainstream world presents great opportunities for both AMD and Microsoft.

In the past, HPC application programming was considerably more difficult, and thus it was really in the domain of a much smaller set of specialists.  But now, the demand for HPC performance and scalability is coming from other “non-traditional” areas (as if there really is something “traditional” about HPC.) One of the more interesting features of Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 includes new ways to speed-up Microsoft Office Excel workbooks—such as support for running Excel user-defined functions and Excel workbooks on the nodes of an HPC cluster. Imagine being able to harness an HPC cluster to turn functions around in minutes instead of hours. This can help create big productivity gains for people in a lot of different areas within the business or organization.

Another new feature that will take advantage of the large core counts in our processors is the support for larger clusters, more jobs, and larger jobs—this should help improve scheduling and task throughput at scale. As you are able to schedule and run more than before, you really want more cores to help make that happen.

Because there is a huge pool of programmers that already have the capabilities to program in a Windows Server environment and with Visual Studio 2010, the ability to add HPC capability easily and quickly within an organization means that companies will be able to harness the power of HPC like never before.

AMD Opteron 6000 Series platforms can give customers the ability to deploy up to 48 cores in a single rack unit for a density never seen before. If you are building out a smaller cluster with, say 1000 cores, the density that you could achieve with our products would allow you to pack all of that compute power into a single rack – something that was unimaginable only a year ago.

Many customers are adding these new smaller clusters into places that are already power constrained.  For them, the AMD Opteron 4000 Series platforms allow for the lowest available energy draw per core, which can help you build out a cluster without having to rebuild your data center.

But, while these new smaller clusters are interesting to us from a growth perspective, we can’t take our eyes off the fact the Windows HPC Server systems are starting to make appearances in the Top500 list that is published twice a year. As a matter of fact, one of the new features of the software is improved scalability—with out-of-the-box support for deploying, running, and managing clusters of 1,000 nodes or more.

It could be a very interesting back half of the year with this new HPC operating system being released to production.

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.

Housed at The University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), the “Ranger” supercomputer is being tapped to help emergency response personnel deal with the spill. Scientists at the university are running thousands of simulations of Hurricanes Ike, Gustav and Katrina to understand what could happen if a hurricane hits the Gulf this summer. They’re also researching significant “plumes” of oil that are currently impacting, or could impact, the Louisiana and Texas coastlines, especially the environmentally sensitive marshes and wetlands. The high resolution models of the Gulf coast needed by these researchers gobble up huge amounts of computing power – a need that can only be met by using  one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers – in this case, “Ranger.”

“Ranger,” currently the 11th most powerful supercomputer in the world, according to the June 2010 edition of the Top 500 list, is powered by nearly 16,000 Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processors.

Researchers are hoping the spill simulations generated by “Ranger” will help emergency personnel on the ground know what to expect and how to plan their response.

In the two-plus years since “Ranger” has been operational, it has become one of the leading  supercomputers for open science research, and has been used by researchers to help address challenges and make discoveries across all domains of science including astrophysics, climate and weather, and earth mantle convection. For more information on “Ranger”, please read here.

It’s heartening to learn about the all the good science “Ranger” is being applied toward. But it’s far from a Lone Ranger in this regard.  Supercomputers around the globe are being tasked with helping to solve some of the world’s greatest challenges. Here are just a few more examples of how supercomputers are emerging as real-life superheroes.

• “Jaguar,” the world’s fastest supercomputer (as of the time of this post) and also powered by AMD processors, is an open science tool devoted to scientific questions around climate change, renewable energy and medicine.
• Seattle-based Intellectual Ventures is using supercomputing power to help eliminate malaria.
• Researcher Lars-Erik Cederman relies on supercomputers at ETH Zurich and the Center for Comparative and International Studies to study the origin of international conflict.
• Ames Laboratory researchers are using US Dept. of Energy supercomputers to study environmental issues such as climate change and clean water.
• Leading supercomputer vendor Cray, Inc. was recently awarded $47 million by the U.S. government to build a next-generation supercomputer for advanced climate modeling.
• The European Union has embarked on a massive research initiative called FutueIcT to do nothing short of simulating life on earth.

The supercomputing community is a competitive one with universities and governments around the globe constantly vying to take home the coveted title of world’s most powerful supercomputer.  The rise in social supercomputing – applying this awesome power to solve society’s toughest challenges – only stands to gain from this competition.

Now that’s super.

Catherine Greenlaw 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 links sites and no endorsement is implied.

One of the biggest challenges that high performance computing clusters face is the fact that they strive for 100% efficiency. Nobody will reach that level, of course, but seeing systems with efficiency in the 80-85% range is not unheard of. As a matter of fact, a great many of them are in that range. When you contrast that to the typical server, which can run in the 15-20% utilization range, it’s clear that HPC servers are in a different class.

But that does not mean that they don’t worry about power efficiency. One of the growing concerns with installing the largest HPC clusters is power consumption, because the new Petaflop clusters draw multiple megawatts.  These large systems need to be installed where they can get the power.  The “Jaguar” installation at Oak Ridge National Labs, for example, can draw between 5-10 megawatts.

Stuffing hundreds or thousands of servers into a small, condensed area (in racks, of course) leads one to wonder how you can make them more efficient.

Cray is doing significant work to make their XT systems environmentally responsible.  (There’s a “cool” video here on that topic.)

AMD and HP have also been working hard to deliver energy efficiency in the HPC world. Take a look at how AMD and HP can help you drive down power consumption in a highly efficient cluster.

We have engineered the AMD-P suite of power management features into our AMD Opteron^TM processors to help drive better power efficiency. Functions like our AMD CoolCore™ technology, which shuts down parts of the processor logic when they are not in use, help make sure that your systems are as efficient as possible, regardless of the utilization level. Even if you are running your application at 80% utilization, there are parts of the processor that don’t need to be “lit up” to run your applications, so shutting down that logic can help drive better power efficiency.

Part of the challenge that we face, as a processor vendor, is that we are only as good as the platforms that our technology partners bring to market.  Adding a feature to the processor that is not integrated by our server partners becomes the proverbial “tree falling in the forest.” Luckily we have server partners that care as much as we do about power efficiency, so their AMD technology-based platforms deliver a wide range of power efficiency capabilities.

As we move forward into 2010 and introduce both our AMD Opteron 6100 Series processor (codenamed “Magny-Cours”) and our power efficient AMD Opteron 4100 Series processor (codenamed “Lisbon”), we expect to see a host of new platforms designed around energy efficiency. Most importantly, we expect see energy efficiency without compromise on performance.

And don’t forget that even if you aren’t running an HPC cluster, there is probably a trick or two that we can show you to help overcome the problem of power in the data center.

Besides power efficiency, the HPC world is also giving virtualization a whirl. Take a look at a recent blog by my colleague Margaret Lewis to learn how the AMD processor-based Red Storm supercomputer is investigating the merits of virtualization.

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.

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.