ACADEMIA

Continuing to bring industry leaders together to drive innovation in high performance computing (HPC) solutions, QLogic today announced a collaboration with Dell to create public access for the first time to HPC clusters based on the recently announced Six-Core AMD Opteron processor -- codenamed "Istanbul." Located at the QLogic NETtrack Developer Center in Shakopee, Minnesota, the cluster consists of Dell PowerEdge servers and QLogic quad data rate (QDR) InfiniBand switches and adapters running on Microsoft's Windows HPC Server 2008 operating system. The first application to be tested on the cluster is ANSYS FLUENT 12 computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software using ANSYS' extensive suite of testing and benchmarking simulations.

The NETtrack Developer Center was designed by QLogic to enable companies to test drive applications on the latest processor, networking and storage technologies. With the addition of this HPC cluster from Dell and QLogic, customers can conduct real-world performance evaluations and see first-hand the price/performance and performance/watt advantages of AMD Opteron processor technology, which is designed to deliver superior efficiency for HPC users at cost-effective price points.

"The collaboration to create of one of the first publicly available test-bed systems with Dell PowerEdge servers based on Six-Core AMD Opteron processors is a huge step in our ongoing support for research-intensive communities for benchmarking and workload characterization," said Tim Carroll, business development manager for Dell's High Performance Solution Group. "This allows us to introduce new technologies for improved performance and scalability to be at the forefront of delivering advanced access to the latest, leading-edge technology for general purpose testing."

"With the Six-core AMD Opteron processor now available to customers, QLogic is working in concert with our partners to deliver HPC solutions that scale to meet our customers' most challenging problems," said Jesse Parker, vice president and general manager, Network Solutions Group, QLogic. "The evolution of the high performance computing market demands breakthroughs in computing capacity, cluster-interconnect bandwidth and scalability that are being delivered by both AMD and QLogic. QLogic InfiniBand adapters and switches, based on QLogic's TrueScale architecture, coupled with clusters based on the AMD Opteron processors, offer the performance and scalability to meet the needs of a long list of demanding HPC applications."

Customers and partners can learn more about the QLogic NETtrack Developer Center at www.qlogic.com/DeveloperCenter/netTrackDevelopersCenter.aspx