Cray Systems' Jaguar supercomputer, running Advanced Micro Devices six-core Opteron processors, was awarded the top slot Monday among the world's fastest 500 machines after running an industry benchmark at an astounding performance level of 1.759 petaFLOPS, or 1.759 quadrillion calculations per second. By contrast, IBM's BlueGene/P supercomputer achieved just 825.5 TeraFLOPS on the identical Linpack benchmark.
AMD Vice President Patrick Patla said the chipmaker supplied high-performance computing (HPC) chips for four out of the world's top five supercomputers, according to the Top500 Project's latest list -- which is compiled by researchers at Germany's University of Mannheim, the University of Tennessee, and NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
"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," Patla said.
Better Balanced Platforms
At the heart of AMD's supercomputing vision is ATI Stream -- a set of advanced hardware and software technologies for enabling AMD's graphics processor chips, working in tandem with the system's central processing unit, to accelerate many advanced software applications. The technology is capable of solving parallel problems unrelated to graphics delivery that nevertheless map well on the company's GPU architecture, the company said.
AMD's technology is still evolving. The chipmaker said it's currently working with industry partners and academic institutions worldwide to build a complete ATI Stream computing ecosystem containing all the tools, applications and performance enhancements for implementing the company's low-cost application acceleration vision.
Meanwhile, some supercomputer customers continue to see merit in running processors from multiple vendors. China's new Tianhe-1 ("River in Sky") supercomputer for solving complex petroleum exploration and aircraft design problems, which is number five on the latest Top500 Project list, features a hybrid design -- with each node consisting of two AMD GPUs attached to two Intel Xeon processors.
When it comes to quantity, Intel continues to provide the lion's share of processors for the world's supercomputing systems. A total of 402 systems out of the top 500 are currently using Intel processors -- up slightly from 399 systems six months earlier, the Top500 Project said.
Just Around the Corner
The National Center for Computational Science in Oak Ridge -- which upgraded its Jaguar supercomputer earlier this year -- now possesses a supercomputer with a theoretical peak capability of 2.3 petaFLOPS. "Since July, the Jaguar's number of compute cores has been increased from 129,600 to 224,162 and -- what's substantial -- it has been equipped with AMD's new six-core processors Istanbul, which have only been available since August, and 2GB of memory per core," said Top500 Project researcher Hans Meuer. (continued...)
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