AMD scores on the TOP500 supercomputer benchmarking

Nov 16, 2009 08:19 GMT  ·  By

The TOP500 organization made a classification of the world's currently most advanced supercomputers according to their performance. Although Intel has long contributed to the creation of leading supercomputers, it seems it cannot brag about being the best in this area, that title belonging to none other than Advanced Micro Devices.

Just days after Intel and AMD signed an uneasy truce, the latter already took the lead in one of the most interesting areas of the IT industry. Cray Inc.'s machine, dubbed "Jaguar," running on AMD central processing units, was labeled a "supreme supercomputer" by TOP500.

A notable fact is that Intel-powered machines weren't even runner-ups. The best-performing Intel-powered conglomerate only managed to score number five on the benchmarks, with the Tianhe-1, based at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, China. One can only guess what kind of reaction this development stirred in Intel directors just days after having to sign an uneasy truce with their rival.

"AMD continues its solid leadership in supercomputing, with four of the top five systems depending on AMD for record-setting performance," Advanced Micro Devices spokesperson John Frueheh explained. He said that a "strong presence" in the HPC arena was held by the enterprise, with both AMD CPUs and ATI GPUs powering a number of top supercomputing systems (such as the Kraken, another upgraded Cray XT5).

As the quote suggests, the Jaguar is an upgraded Cray XT5 supercomputer. It is based at the ORNL (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) and uses 37,376 six-core AMD Opteron processors, which deliver no less than 2.3 petaflops per second of theoretical performance and 1.75 petaflops per second on the Linpack benchmark. This time is the third try of the Jaguar to surpass the previous leader, IBM's Roadrunner, after two barely failed tries in November 2008 and June 2009. The Roadrunner was the first supercomputer to reach a petaflop-level performance (with 1.105 being its highest level recorded). This time around, it only reached 1.04 petaflops per second because of having been repartitioned.

The above facts, however, wouldn't be very disconcerting to the CPU developer, as the Roadrunner is also powered by AMD CPUs, along with the Kraken (which achieved third place) and Jugene (fourth place). Thus, the Sunnyvale-based IT developer can boast of achieving performance superiority compared with any other CPU manufacturer, including the Santa Clara-based Intel Corp. Powering the best four supercomputers is an obvious indicator of just how much faster AMD central processing units are (or can be) compared with Intel's, and why the latter couldn't, so far, eliminate the former from the IT market.

The full classification can be found here.