14 DAY TRIAL // ScaleMP, a provider of virtualization solutions for high-end computing, announced recently that the company has managed to achieve a record-breaking result in the SPEC benchmark for shared memory systems based on AMD processors.
The virtualization software developed by the company is designed to use off-the-shelf x86 servers for creating a single virtual high-end system.
This provides its customers with an alternative to traditional expensive symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) maxhines and also simplifies the cluster administration by using a single operating system.
A virtual cluster built using ScaleMP's technology can aggregate up to 128 servers and support up to 1,024 AMD Opteron 6100-series processors, based on the Magny-Cours design, as well as a maximum of 64TB of shared memory.
In such a vSMP system, ScaleMP's architecture will take care of providing cache coherency between the machines, as well as sharing the I/O and the system interfaces (BIOS, ACPI).
The inter-connect of choice is Infiniband since it can provide the high bandwidth and low latency required for the cluster system.
"These exceptional performance results follow our recent announcement of our strategic collaboration with AMD," said Shai Fultheim, ScaleMP's founder and CEO.
"Based on these benchmarks, customers can be assured that when using vSMP Foundation with AMD-based machines, they will be getting a high-performance virtual SMP in one, affordable package," concluded the company's rep.
Despite the record breaking result ScaleMP claims it has achieved, the company hasn't mentioned any specifics about the specifications of the system used for its attempt of the actual benchmark numbers it reached.
Until recently, ScaleMP's virtualization software only supported Intel's Xeon processors, but at the end of September, the company also brought its technology to AMD's Opteron server CPUs.