AMD Processors Power Leading Research and Academic Supercomputers

“HPC is not a one-size-fits-all environment, and requires new technologies to keep pace with customer demands,” said Paul Struhsaker, corporate vice president and general manager, Commercial Business at AMD. “Whether it’s our upcoming “Interlagos” processor or our energy-efficient APU, AMD’s unique x86 and world-class graphics IP place us at the heart of some of the fastest systems as we push well beyond the petaflop towards the exaflop.”

ORNL is upgrading its “Jaguar” system to the Cray XK6 supercomputer nicknamed “Titan.” Powered by AMD’s “Interlagos” processors, Titan will have peak performance between 10 and 20 petaflops (quadrillion mathematical calculations per second) of high performance computing power.

ORNL is deploying more than 25,000 of AMD’s ‘Interlagos’ processors over the next few months as we upgrade Jaguar to the new Titan system, said Buddy Bland, project director of ORNL's Leadership Computing Facility. “Our users are excited about the increase in performance over previous-generation processors, and our sponsors are delighted with the power savings that will make Titan one of the world’s most powerful and efficient research tools.

In addition to the Titan supercomputer, Cray is utilizing the exceptional performance, scalability and efficiency of AMD’s “Interlagos” processors and the new “Bulldozer” x86 core architecture to build HPC systems for leading research and academic institutions, including:

■NAMEM – Located in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, NAMEM specializes in weather forecasting and climate projection integration and performs regional weather and climate models for operational and research purposes;
■CSCS – Located in Manno, Switzerland, CSCS is the national HPC center in Switzerland and operates leading-edge Cray supercomputers based on AMD technologies;
■HECToR – Operated by the University of Edinburgh and funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, HECToR is the UK national HPC service and serves a broad community of scientific users across Europe;
■HLRS – The High Performance Computing Center at the University of Stuttgart provides a Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) tier-0 supercomputing resource for researchers, scientists and engineers throughout Europe with a particular focus on CFD and other engineering disciplines.
“When designing a supercomputer, we meticulously evaluate the best combination of performance and efficiency for our customers,” said Barry Bolding, vice president of Cray’s product division. “AMD’s ‘Interlagos’ processors offer incredible performance for highly parallel applications, and customer interest continues to grow for our Cray XE6 and Cray XK6 supercomputers featuring the world’s first 16-core x86 processor and AMD’s powerful Flex FP architecture.”

Additionally, Penguin Computing has successfully installed the world’s first HPC cluster powered by AMD APUs at Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque, NM. Designed with power efficiency in mind, the AMD A8-3850 APU-based Altus 2A00 will support exploration of advanced programming models and has the potential to become a key component of future exascale systems.

The award-winning AMD Opteron 6100 Series processor is also powering new deployments at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) near Santa Fe, NM and the University of São Paulo. Used for scientific computing, the Appro Xtreme-X™ Supercomputer at LANL will feature more than 38,000 AMD Opteron processor cores with a performance of 353 Tflops. The Astronomy Department of the University of Sao Paulo will leverage the SGI® Altix® ICE 8400 high performance computing system to enable advanced scientific astronomical research in Brazil with more than 1,500 AMD Opteron processor cores in a single rack.