Six-Core Opterons Boost Cray's 'Jaguar' to First Place in Top 500 List

Sunnyvale, California-based Advanced Micro Devices, the world's second largest vendor of computer processors, has managed to claim the number-one spot in recently updated Top 500 list of the world's most power supercomputers, with its recently introduced Six-Core Opteron processors, codenamed Istanbul. The performance was enabled by the AMD processor-based 'Jaguar' system, developed by the Cray, which couples the new Opteron processors with 300TB of memory and 10PB of hard disk space, enabling the system to deliver 2.3 petaflop/s theoretical peak performance and 1.75 petaflop/s performance on the Linpack benchmark.

“We’ve seen the trend in the HPC industry’s move to multi-core x86-based supercomputing and it’s clear that the Six-Core AMD Opteron processor is the ideal choice right now for a world-class supercomputer,” said Patrick Patla, vice president and general manager, Server/Workstation and Embedded Division, AMD. “Today, AMD also powers the world’s highest performing system leveraging the incredible floating point capability of AMD GPUs and bringing the vision of ATI Stream technology to life. Our OEM customers and the global institutions engaged in cutting-edge research and industrial HPC understand that a truly balanced system helps advance their work and provide an upgrade path to the future.”

In addition to landing the number one spot in the Top 500 Supercomputing list, AMD managed to prove its presence in the supercomputing segment by having 4 of the Top 5 systems being powered by AMD products and technologies, including the Tianhe-1, in China, and the Cray XT5 'Kraken' system. The chip maker can also pride itself for having powered IBM's 'Roadrunner', the world's former highest-performance supercomputer, which features a dual CPU architecture, including the company's own Opteron processors.

The Jaguar was recently upgraded from the former 4-core Opteron processors, to the new 6-core Opteron CPUs, based on the company's Instabul cores and featuring support for up to 2GB of memory per core. The improved supercomputer at the National Center for Computational Science in Oak Ridge posted a 1.75 petaflops performance, compared to the Roadrunner's performance of 1.04 petaflops.

For a better understanding of what AMD's six-core 'Istanbul' processors can achieve, be sure to check out the video below, showing the upgrade process from the 4-core Opteron processors to the six-core Opterons, in Cray's Kraken supercomputer.