APPLICATIONS

PathScale, the developer of innovative software and hardware solutions to accelerate high performance computing, today announced that its InfiniPath HTX InfiniBand Adapters have been deployed by AMD in its Developer Center to maximize application scaling on the newly installed Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor-based ‘Emerald’ cluster. The combination of Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors and the InfiniPath interconnect is already demonstrating unprecedented performance, enabling Emerald to outperform traditional supercomputers in several critical benchmarks in the latest High Performance Computing (HPC) Challenge. The HPC Challenge, sponsored by DARPA, the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), consists of nine benchmarks that evaluate how HPC systems handle real-world applications. Based on the most recent benchmarks, the AMD Emerald cluster with the InfiniPath InfiniBand interconnect outperformed much larger supercomputer systems. For instance, the 512-core AMD Opteron processor-based Emerald cluster configuration outperformed the highest-end systems from the three leading supercomputing suppliers in the Random Access (GUPs), Random Ring Latency, and Natural Ring Latency benchmarks. These benchmarks are highly sensitive to memory update performance and the speed of network communications, and showcase the clear performance advantages of the InfiniPath interconnect and Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors with Direct Connect Architecture. The AMD Emerald cluster, supplied by Rackable Systems, is comprised of 144 nodes, each with two 2.2 GHz Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors, for a total of 576 processing cores. Each node is equipped with a single PathScale InfiniPath HTX InfiniBand Adapter connected to a SilverStorm 9120 144-port InfiniBand switch. The AMD Emerald system, which achieved 2.1 TFLOPs on the Linpack benchmark, has been submitted to the Top500 supercomputing list, which ranks the 500 largest supercomputers in the world. The AMD Emerald system is one of the largest publicly accessible Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor-based InfiniBand clusters in the world. “When matching up the low-latency PathScale InfiniPath interconnect with the low-latency Direct Connect Architecture of AMD Opteron processors, the Emerald cluster produces phenomenal results,” said Pat Patla, director, server/workstation marketing, Microprocessor Solutions Sector, AMD. “We have worked with PathScale to showcase this incredible performance through Emerald – the most powerful cluster ever implemented at the AMD Developer Center.” Located at the AMD Developer Center in Sunnyvale, Calif., Emerald is designed to provide AMD’s development collaborators and customers a way to benchmark and test performance-sensitive computing applications using the company’s Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor technology. PathScale’s InfiniPath is a cluster-interconnect that plugs directly into the HyperTransport interface on AMD Opteron processor-based servers, and designed to dramatically improve communications within the cluster. “The HPC Challenge benchmark results prove that InfiniPath can scale AMD Opteron processor-based clusters to performance levels that exceed systems from some of today’s supercomputing giants,” said Scott Metcalf, CEO of PathScale. “These benchmarks further validate the performance advantages of InfiniBand, and should demonstrate to the scientific and engineering communities that they no longer have to rely on proprietary technologies from the traditional, high priced supercomputing suppliers. They can now have an advantage by leveraging AMD Opteron processor-based Linux clusters and the InfiniPath interconnect to build cost-effective systems for their most demanding applications.” The PathScale InfiniPath interconnect helps deliver on the promise of Linux cluster computing by significantly lowering communications latency, helping to improve the performance of complex applications. The technology is enabling scientists, engineers and researchers to more effectively solve a whole new class of computational challenges, from weather modeling and aerospace design to drug discovery and oil and gas research. Today, the InfiniPath interconnect is used by leading scientific and engineering organizations in both the private and government sectors.