INDUSTRY

HP announced that AMD has purchased several hundred HP BladeSystem c-Class server blades powered by AMD Opteron processors to support the development of its chip designs. AMD chose the new HP ProLiant BL465c servers over competitive offerings for their industry-leading performance, power and cooling efficiencies and system management capabilities. “HP’s Linux-based BladeSystem solution’s integrated consoles and power control help us to manage more servers without increasing our staff,” said Mike Lowe, director, Chipset Engineering, AMD. “These new systems help AMD take advantage of the latest HP and AMD high-performance and power-saving technologies and dramatically increase the density of our world-class engineering design compute cluster to enable us to bring new generations of chip designs to market efficiently and cost-effectively.” AMD’s new infrastructure is its first large deployment of blade servers in its engineering design environment. AMD is experiencing an increase in performance-per-watt of up to 30 percent in the new server blade-based environment compared to currently installed standard rack-mounted servers. AMD’s silicon design team will use the new systems for electronic design automation applications such as architecture, circuit and verification tasks on existing and future microprocessor design projects. “Since its introduction in June of this year, HP BladeSystem c-Class is helping customers around the world move toward an automated, ‘lights out’ computing environment while reducing the costs and obstacles of a racked, stacked and wired environment,” said Winston Prather, vice president and general manager, High Performance Computing Division, HP. “AMD is leading the way by implementing an adaptive infrastructure in a 17-inch enclosure that uses high-performing AMD Opteron processors.” The HP BladeSystem c-Class architecture offers Next-Generation AMD Opteron processors with Direct Connect Architecture that surpass the competition in the areas of power and cooling, management and virtualization: • HP Thermal Logic Technologies apply thermal controls to turn high density into a power and cooling advantage without compromising processing performance. The new blade racks consume about 17 percent less electricity during operation than the previous racks. • HP Insight Control Management achieves a 200:1 device-to-administrator ratio – a tenfold improvement for many IT tasks – by integrating industry-leading system management tools from HP with the HP BladeSystem infrastructure. • The HP Virtual Connect Architecture, which solves networking complexity challenges by enabling customers to wire just once, is a breakthrough approach to connecting servers to LANs and SANs that simplifies operations between domains and eliminates barriers to change. AMD’s engineering design environment is based on an open-architecture run and managed with Linux and open source tools. The HP BladeSystem solution running Red Hat Enterprise Linux was proposed and implemented in AMD’s Sunnyvale, Calif., and Boxborough, Mass., design centers by HP Platinum and Linux Elite partner, Dasher Technologies. Dasher, located in Aptos, Calif., offers integrated electronic design automation solutions and provided AMD with on-site system integration, management configuration and stress testing. The overall HP BladeSystem solution, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, is now supported by HP Services. While the blades will be housed in AMD’s Sunnyvale and Boxborough locations, they will also provide increased computing power to engineering teams in Texas, Colorado and India. More information about HP BladeSystem c-Class server blades is available at its Web site.