DoD Unveils Its Largest Supercomputer to Date, Powered by AMD Magny-Cours CPUs

The US Department of Defense has recently unveiled its largest supercomputer to date, a Cray XE6 system that is known by the name of Raptor and packs no less than 43,712 AMD Magny Cours computer cores and 87.7 Terabytes of system memory.

The machine is installed at the Air Force Research Laboratory Supercomputing Resource Center and, according to WhioTV it will be used to ease weapon systems design, advance design concepts and accelerate modification programs for critical warfighting systems.

As the same publication reports, the system is powered by 5,464 eight-core AMD Magny Cours processors running at 2.4GHz, has 87.7 Terabytes of DDR3 memory and 1.6 PetaBytes of usable disk space.

AMD's Opteron Magny-Cours CPUs are the company's most advanced server chips as they feature eight or 12 processing cores, 12MB of Level 3 cache memory (of which only 10MB are available), and range in speed between 1.7GHz and 2.6GHz.

In addition, the CPUs are compatible with dual and quad socket motherboards as well as with UDDR3 and RDDR3 memory.

Judging by the clock speed and the core number, DoD's machine is built using Opteron 6136 chips, which have a TDP of 115W (80W ACP) and are compatible with the G34 socket.

The same socket will also be used for AMD's upcoming Interlagos processors built on the Bulldozer architecture that can pack as much as 16 processing cores.

The CPUs inside the Raptor supercomputer are linked together via a new Gemini interconnect which allows them to communicate with each other at speeds of up to16 Gigabytes per second.

To keep the temperatures of the supercomputer in check as well as to decrease the energy costs associated with running such a powerful supercomputer, the cabinets are cooled by the so called ECOphlex technology, a liquid-cooling temperature-controlled system.