INDUSTRY

By Chris O'Neal -- Chip manufacturer AMD has broken into the supercomputing market with its Opteron processor. It is heavily involved in two of the most high-profile projects in recent months. The first will see around 2000 Opteron chips utilized by Chinese supercomputer-maker Dawning Information Industry. The Dawning 4000A will be a cluster of machines running a Chinese version of Linux and will aim for around 10 teraflops of computing power. The second supercomputing project AMD is involved in sees the chipmaker supplying the chips for a Cray system, Red Storm that is being built for the US Department of Energy. The supercomputer will contain around 10,000 Opteron chips and be capable of churning 40 trillion calculations per second (40 teraflops) when it becomes operational in 2004. AMD has a strong presence at the SC2003 show, so to learn more Supercomputing Online interviewed David Rich, director of High Performance Computing, AMD. Supercomputing Online: Hi David, thank you for the interview. What are a couple major foci here at this year's show? Rich: We're driving home the performance advantage of an integrated memory controller, 32 & 64 bit compatibility and the great throughput provided by HyperTransport Technology. The exciting thing this year is the number of partners and demos that we're showing using Opteron. Everything from new hardware platforms to ports of applications to AMD64 and demonstrations of just about every high speed interconnect available. From time to time I try to remember to mention that the exact same architecture is available in desktop and notebook configurations. Supercomputing Online: Some information I received recently mentioned that AMD is working with Cray to create a product line based on the Red Storm. Please elaborate on this a bit. Cray has announced that they intend to productize the Red Storm product and we are, of course, very pleased with their decision. From an AMD perspective, we're very excited about the kind of functionality that Cray is building around our processor. Their interconnect, system management features and of course their abilities as a company to support this product are all first class. It's great to have a partner that is able to build a system with tens of thousands of processors! Supercomputing Online: As a company, what is AMD most proud of at SC2003? How about you personally? Rich: AMD is proud to see the amount of enthusiasm (and sales) we've generated in this market since our launch in April. If you think about the length of time it normally takes for new processor architectures to be adopted, the progress we're making is absolutely stunning. From my personal standpoint I am very proud to see our acceptance in the HPC market, both by end users and system vendors. My group provides engineering support for most of the new systems which have been developed and so we are doubly pleased by all the new announcements. Small specialized vendors through global tier 1 suppliers are adopting our products and everything from laptops through desktops, workstations and servers and on through to purpose built supercomputers are now being built on the AMD64 architecture. We're having a boatload of fun! Supercomputing Online would like to thank David Rich for his time and insight.