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AMD Shows Emerald Cluster Featuring 576 Opteron Cores

AMD today unveiled its Emerald cluster installation. The AMD Developer Center's Emerald is its newest and largest system, as well as its first publicly-available cluster based entirely on Dual-Core AMD Opteron(tm) processors with Direct Connect Architecture. AMD is offering use of Emerald to industry partners, developers, customers and end users as a cutting-edge, multi-core test and development platform.

This cluster is comprised of 144 Rackable Systems nodes, each containing two Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors model 275, for a total of 576 cores. For the HPC Challenge benchmark suite, using a 512-core Emerald configuration, AMD was able to achieve the #1 score in the Random Access (GUPs) benchmark and also measure 1.865 TFlop/s for an efficiency rate of 82.8 percent. The HPC Challenge benchmark is designed to measure a variety of factors influencing application performance, including sustainable memory bandwidth and latency. These benchmarks are highly sensitive to memory update performance and the speed of network communications, and showcase the clear advantages of AMD64's Direct Connect Architecture. The Emerald cluster has 1,152 GB RAM, and includes Cyclades TS3000 Console Server; a Force10 Networks E300 Series Switch; Iwill DK8-HTX motherboards; Panasas ActiveScale Storage Cluster; Pathscale InfiniPath HTX InfiniBand Adapters; Rackable Systems servers leveraging DC Power technology; Samsung Electronics 2GB DDR400 memory modules based on single-rank 1Gbit technology; and a Silverstorm 9120 InfiniBand Switch.

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Posted by | Tue, Nov 15, 2005 - 10:19 AM