ECONOMICS

AMD today announced at Supercomputing 2003 the AMD Opteron(TM) processor has appeared an impressive four times for its debut on the Top500 Supercomputer list. "The AMD Opteron processor has marched straight to the top ten of the supercomputing field," said Marty Seyer, vice president and general manager of AMD's Microprocessor Business Unit. "The swift adoption and installation of these ultra-powerful AMD Opteron processor-based supercomputers clearly shows the HPC community had been anxiously awaiting this processor." The Top500 list is published twice yearly and is based on the LINPAC benchmark, which measures a computer's floating-point rate of executing linear equations and is expressed in Gigaflops (Gflop/s) or billions of floating point operations per second. The number six supercomputer, built by Linux Networx and in service at Los Alamos National Laboratory, comes in as the highest AMD Opteron processor-based system on the Top500 and operates at a maximal LINPAC performance rate of 8,051 Gflop/s with a theoretical peak performance of 11,264 Gflop/s. The Innovative Computing Lab at the University of Tennessee, which co-authors the Top500 list, has selected the AMD Opteron processor-based system from Atipa Technologies for a new supercomputing cluster scheduled to be delivered by December 1, 2003. The 64-node cluster is designed to use 128 AMD Opteron processors and is planned to support a variety of projects for the lab, including various benchmarks and Grid related projects. "Our new AMD Opteron processor-based cluster will deliver increased performance to enable us to make more efficient use of our Grid environment, called SInRG, on the University of Tennessee campus," said Jack Dongarra, Distinguished Professor at the University of Tennessee. "It also will offer improved performance for tasks such as the development of new numerical algorithms and computational kernels used to alleviate commonly occurring bottlenecks in high performance computing." Additional AMD Opteron processor-based supercomputers making the list include: an installation at Doshisha University's Intelligent Systems Design Laboratory in Kyoto, Japan and built by Visual Technology at number 93, a supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory designed by Linux Networx at number 116, and at number 247, a system built by RackSaver with Arima and Myricom, Inc., in service at AMD's Developer Center in Sunnyvale, California. Many research institutions and universities have embraced the stability and reliability of the AMD Athlon(TM) MP processor line, which offers leading in-class performance and also appears throughout the TOP500 list.