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 big events of this annual supercomputing conference is the release of the TOP500 Supercomputing List. In my past life I would wait impatiently to see how MHPCC systems would rank. Now I wait impatiently to see how AMD-based systems all over the world stack up. There are no disappointments in the 34^th TOP500 List published this week, featuring 42 systems running AMD technology.

Five of these systems are located the elite class of the top 10 supercomputers in the world.  Here are some “fun facts” for your enjoyment:

• The #1 supercomputer is Jaguar located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory – a Cray XT5 system running Six-Core AMD Opteron^TM processors. Jaguar was originally built using Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors and over the past few months technicians at the Tennessee lab have been replacing many of those chips with newer six cores models. You can get more details on this very fast cat, which now features almost a quarter million high-performance cores, in John Fruehe’s blog.
• The #5 supercomputer is Tianhe-1, which represents the coming era of heterogeneous computing. Tainhe-1 was developed by NUDT for the National SuperComputer Center in Tianjin. It is the world’s highest performing GPU-based supercomputer ever and is fueled by ATI Radeon^TM RV770 architecture, demonstrating the powerful computational capabilities of AMD’s GPU technology.  Much like the x86 processor based systems, which first entered the TOP500 list about 10 years ago and now account for over 430 systems, this is just the beginning of a new trend – and we are already at the top already.
• The #2 system is Roadrunner, located at Los Alamos National Labs. This is another example of a hybrid computing system, utilizing both IBM PowerXCell and AMD Opteron processor technology. This system became the world’s first TOP500 petaflops system in 2008 and has previously held the #1 slot on the TOP500.
• The #3 system, Kraken is a Cray XT5 system located at the National Institute for Computational Sciences at the University of Tennessee. It is running Six Core AMD Opteron processors, and is one of the most powerful supercomputer funded by the NSF TeraGrid as well as one of the world’s largest computational platforms for open scientific research. Here is a link to a video that showcases how this powerful supercomputer is being used by the research community. 
• My Alma Mater, the University of Texas, has its Ranger system located at the Texas Advanced Computing Center as #9 on the list. This system is also running Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor technology and provides unprecedented computational capabilities to the national research community. Go Horns!

And if you widen your view and take a look at #11 thru #20 on the TOP500 List, you will find that ½ of these systems are also running AMD Opteron processors.  So while our competitor might claim quantity, we are thrilled to highlight the quality showing of AMD technology in the 34^th TOP500.  This reflects our drive to deliver leading edge innovation to the market. You can find more details about what we are planning in the future from the materials we presented on Financial Analyst Day on Nov. 11^th.

And congratulations to the MHPCC, which has systems ranked at #58 and #114 on the TOP500 List. Maui no ka oi.

Margaret Lewis (@margaretjlewis) is a Product Marketing Director 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.

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.

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 Opteron^TM processors today, there is already a planned upgrade to Six-Core AMD Opteron^TM 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 23^rd largest supercomputer in the world and the 4^th 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.

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.