ENGINEERING

Atipa Technologies, a well-recognized manufacturer of high-end, Linux-based servers and clusters for High Performance Computing, announced today that it has been working with AMD to introduce a new line of servers based on their dual-core readiness. Featuring Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors, Atipa Technologies will ship servers and Linux-based clusters from 1U to 5U platforms at introduction. Whether they’re used for research in oil exploration, nuclear modeling, graphics rendering, financial market prediction, weather simulations or genetic modeling, users can expect to see industry-leading performance gains from this advance in technology. In addition to the AMD Opteron processor’s Direct Connect Architecture, which directly connects the processor to memory and I/O rather than sending data through a traditional front-side bus architecture, the new dual-core processors feature two discreet CPU cores on a single piece of silicon. With HyperTransport technology and Direct Connect Architecture, the dual-core processor produces four processing threads, which will appear to the operating system as four separate processors, allowing for faster speeds and significant performance gains. Once software applications are optimized to take advantage of this new technology, boosts in server performance will become even more apparent. Atipa Technologies has been getting ready for the 64-bit dual-core migration since 2004; Atipa Clusters based on AMD Opteron processors were built with dual-core capable motherboards. By updating the firmware for the motherboards, Atipa cluster owners can use the same socket design for its dual-core chips as it does for its single-core chips. Thus, Atipa customers can directly benefit from the drastic performance improvement of this technology advancement. “Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors obviously make migration much quicker than staging new boxes with new motherboards. They demonstrate the best performance per watt architecture in the market for x86 64-bit computing. Power consumption is an important consideration in the clustering environment. The Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor power consumption is also less than what is used by other single-core chips. The AMD dual-core product will consume 95 watts, which includes the I/O and memory as opposed to 110 watts for a single-core chip plus another 20 watts power consumption for the I/O and memory,” says Dana Chang, Atipa Technologies Vice President. “We are very excited to offer our customers this powerful new processor. The scientists who run millions of steps simultaneously in application software on their clusters, with this technology, will be able to reach a new level of advancement in the computation world. We’re looking forward to bringing the benefits of AMD64 Dual-Core processing to the high performance computing clustering.” “High-compute intensive environments where multithreaded applications are used to perform multiple, complex tasks will see some of the greatest and most immediate benefits from AMD’s dual-core technology,” said Pat Patla, director, Server/Workstation Marketing, AMD. “We applaud Atipa Technologies for working closely with us to deliver this technology quickly to the marketplace and to their customers.” Atipa Technologies has been building Linux-based clusters by connecting commodity components since 2001. As many users have experienced, gaining stable operation and the expected performance from a large-scale cluster needs dedicated technologies from the hardware level to the software level. Atipa Technologies focuses technical knowledge from clustering software aspect and achieves the best bang for the buck in High Performance Computing. In April 2005, Atipa Technologies delivered two large AMD Opteron processor-based supercomputing clusters. This project has used the AMD64 technology for realizing the urgent need of critical computing power. Together with Myrinet as the interconnect, Atipa built two clusters; each consisting of 778 Dual AMD Opteron 250 processor-based compute nodes and 328 Quad AMD Opteron 850 processor-based compute nodes with 25TB SAN file system generating over 320MB/sec aggregated NFS Read and Write performance. Each cluster has achieved a 4100 GFlops HPL performance In April 2005, Atipa Technologies delivered an AMD Opteron processor-based project consisting of 1556 Dual AMD Opteron processor-based boards and 656 Quad AMD Opteron processor-based boards. This project has used the AMD64 technology for realizing the urgent need of critical computing power. Together with Myrinet as the interconnect, Atipa built two clusters; each consisting of 778 Dual AMD Opteron processor-based boards and 328 Quad AMD Opteron processor-based boards with 25TB file system generating over 320MB aggregated in Read/Write. Each cluster has achieved a 4100 GFlops. “This project, and many of Atipa Clusters, reflects one indication; we provide financially feasible products to customers on limited budgets,” says Dana Chang.