Swinging Blue Genes at Lawrence Livermore
CHIP FIRM AMD said its Opteron server chips are appearing like plums in a Christmas pudding amongst the world's highest performing supercomputers.
According to AMD, the world's biggest Opteron supercomputer is seventh on the
Top 500 list - that's the Tsubame machine at the Tokyo Institute of Tech, which uses Sun Fire servers using over 10,000 Opterons. Tests in May showed Tsubame had a sustained performance of 38.18 teraflops.
What's number one? It's Mr Blue Gene/L, based at Lawrence Livermore. The Top 500 site said the largest system in Europe is the French Atomic Energy Itanium Novascale 5160 system built by Bull and which uses 8,704 Itanics and a Quadrics interconnect. Oddly, AMD didn't mention that one in its press release. The University of Stuttgart is also using a big system based on Opterons. AMD Opteron chips will also be used in a supercomputer used by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Appro and Voltaire will provide a system using over 16,000 Opterons which will use DDR 2 memory.
The INQuirer