SCIENCE

By Tyler O'Neal -- Appro is always a staple at the Supercomputing XX conferences. I think of a few great companies right off the bat when someone inevitably informs me that it is time to start planning for the SC show. They are always one of those companies. This year Appro seemed particularly busy to me. From the flood of news releases from every company in or even close to supercomputing leading up to the show to the time this article is being written, it seems like I’ve seen ten press releases from them. They included news of Appro’s Support for Dual-Core/Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processors, hiring a new CTO, Jim Balew from Raytheon and the completion of 2 scalable units for the Peloton project at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). I took a guided tour of Appro’s booth, and stood in the back of the crowd that had gathered for the company’s demonstration. Now, my initial description of their demonstrations may sound a bit biased, but it’s the truth in my opinion and the truth is always the best defense. I will say this about the demonstrations; it was arguably the most impressive thing that I’ve seen at the show. It was best described as enthusiastic, insightful and useful. One of the highlights featured a presentation on the Peloton Project by Adrian Wu, a senior field application engineer at Appro. He detailed the company’s win to deliver 100 teraFLOPS of supercomputing power with multiple Linux-based clusters at LLNL. The first two of these machines, “Rhea” and “Ze” have been delivered to the lab. They are in the process of delivering the third cluster, called "Atlas." The fourth and final cluster, "Minos" will arrive in the first quarter of 2007. LLNL is a leader in the supercomputing space and Appro will benefit from this installation by establishing a great reputation in the high-performance cluster computing market. Wu said that lab officials were looking for supercomputing leadership class machines that would be cost-effective, standardize all the Linux functions on a single platform and give the scientists at the lab a capacity computer. By using AMD's Opteron 8000 series processor, Wu said Appro will give the scientists at the lab a chance to upgrade the clusters without changing most of the hardware. Also, this is expected to help with reducing costs associated with the project. When all four clusters are finished, the machines will deliver a total of 2,592 four socket dual-core Opteron-powered nodes. This will give each node eight processing cores. Each node carries 16GB of DDR2 of RAM. Also what you had at Appro’s booth is a fully integrated solution based on quad-core Intel Xeon processors. They featured two 1U Appro Dual Socket HyperServer cluster nodes based on the Intel Xeon processor 5300 series for a total of 16 cores. These nodes are connected with two 10 Gbps dual-port Mellanox PCIe InfiniBand Adapters running Platform Computing Open Cluster Stack. This cluster demo provides easy, fast and effective workload management offering MPI Optimization Strategies for Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors. A complete white paper based on this demo along with Quad-Core Benchmark results can be downloaded at their Web site. Then I saw Appro demonstrate Xen virtualization with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 running on a 1U 2-way XtremeServer that supports two Dual-Core Opteron processors that feature AMD's hardware virtualization support. The Xen demo highlights CPU and memory performance on the server running the 2.6 Linux kernel and in para-virtualization mode with virtual machine running a modified Linux 2.6 kernel tailored for Xen. In addition, the demo also featured a fully virtual machine running Red Hat Linux 8 on Xen supported by the hardware virtualization technology on the AMD Opteron processors. Appro also demonstrated the HyperBlade Clusters powered by AMD Opteron Processors running on Linux Red Hat operating system featuring the Appro BladeDome, remote management software. The Appro BladeDome Remote management software is IPMI 2.0 compliant and works with either Windows or Linux. Appro also showcased all new Dual/Quad-Core HyperBlade servers powered by Intel Xeon Processors. Finally, I witnessed the new XtremeWorkstation powered by AMD Opteron Processors running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 operating system featuring Fluent (Computational Fluent Dynamics) software 6.2.16 showing 3 demos: CFD car model, CFD airplane model, and data center cooling. The XtremeWorkstation has dual Opteron socket F 2214 (2.4GHz), 16GB of DDR2/667 memory, 2 SATA 120GB in RAID0 (stripping), and one nVidia FX5500 card. It is also important to note that Appro showcased the AMD – Celoxica FPGA card in AMD’s booth. Torrenza technology with Appro’s HTX enabled 1U Quad XtremeServer with Celoxica’s acceleration card to boost enormous performance improvements. The solution consists of an Appro 1U Quad XtremeServer, equipped with an HTX slot where a Celoxica RCHTX acceleration card is added. This card is part of Celoxica’s family of Accelerated Computing products, and enables algorithm acceleration using FPGA based co-processing and high bandwidth communication in computing systems with AMD Opteron processors. This solution accelerates performance improvements in seismic modeling and data processing applications.