14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that things have been changing in the supercomputer industry, as the most recent TOP500 list turned out to be one that allowed AMD's advancements to stand out quite visibly.
TOP500 is a periodically updated list where the many supercomputers around the world are tested for performance.
Advanced Micro Devices didn't get to power many of the greatest machines tested last time but, this once, the TOP500 Supercomputer list held better news for the Sunnyvale, California-based outfit.
14 global OEMs have managed to get a spot on the list using AMD chips, those bing HP, IBM, Koi Computers, Appro, Acer, Megware, Oracle, Penguin, Cray, Dawning, Fujitsu, Dell, and Clustervision/Supermicro.
This means an increase of 15 percent compared to last time and the outfit hopes to see further progress once the upcoming 16-core Interlagos Bulldozer-based chip debuts (over half of the 68 AMD-based supercomputers of the present time use 8-core and 12-core Opteron 6100 chips).
The HPC installations this once recognized are used for weather prediction, computer science, physics, astronomy, life sciences, researching nuclear and alternative energy, etc.
“The introduction of the AMD Opteron processor coincided with the HPC industry’s shift to x86 and cluster-based architecture, away from expensive proprietary or RISC-based systems,” said Leslie Sobon, corporate vice president, product marketing, AMD.
“AMD provided the server technology that helped drive the democratization of supercomputing and has shown steadfast leadership in helping HPC break performance boundaries. Our new 16-core processor codenamed “Interlagos” will add features specifically for HPC and offer the world’s highest core count for x86. In addition to CPUs, we are also now seeing adoption of our GPU technologies in HPC and believe this will be a significant area for further development.”
Once the Interlagos debuts in the third quarter, construction of HPC systems will be able to start. It will be interesting to see what the LINPACK benchmark thinks of them when the time comes.
UPDATE: Fixed the list of OEMs (Cray was listed twice).