14 DAY TRIAL // After AMD's supercomputer breakthrough - the already famous Tsubame - that is based on more than 10,000 AMD Opteron processor cores and Sun Systems' latest Sun Fire servers, here comes Oak Ridge National Labs (ORNL) and Cray's Jaguar that is now only a prototype having a storage capacity of 54 teraflops, after the completion of the first development phase.
The previous capacity was of 25 teraflops that has been upgraded by replacing the 5,212 processors with new dual core Opteron processors, as well as doubling memory capacity. The ORNL representatives said that the second phase will be completed in November, when the Jaguar will be able to power no less than 100 teraflops, as in the third stage, the supercomputer will feature a final 250 teraflops capacity.
The Jaguar will be able to surpass the powerful Tsubame "ranked" after tests at no less than ... 38.18 teraflops. "Supercomputer developers were among the first to embrace the AMD Opteron processor," stated Marty Seyer, senior vice president, Commercial Segment, AMD. "Since that time, traditional enterprise datacenters, facing the same rigorous performance, value, power and cooling requirements, are increasingly choosing AMD Opteron processor-based systems. We are demonstrating that AMD64 is the innovation platform for the future, through our planned quad-core processor roadmap, and our recently announced Torrenza program which allows for the development of special purpose accelerators that will take computing potential to the next level."
AMD's quad-core Opteron processor with DDR2 memory was previously adopted by Cray which signed a contract with ORNL in order to develop the world's first petaflops-speed (1,000 trillion floating-point operations per second) supercomputer that has not seen daylight until now.
The advantage presented by AMD's Opteron is the embedded Direct Connect Architecture featuring HyperTransport technology, which offers scalability for multiprocessor operating.