Los Alamos to Use AMD's Opteron in Linux Clusters

Omega65Omega65 Philadelphia, Pa
edited August 2003 in Science & Tech
<a href="http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1220701,00.asp&quot; target=_blank>eWeek: Los Alamos to Use AMD's Opteron in Linux Clusters</a>

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. got a boost Thursday when the Los Alamos National Laboratory announced it will use more than 3,300 Opteron chips in two of its Linux clusters.

The laboratory will use 2,800 of the AMD chips in what is being called the Lightening cluster, which will be used to support the National Nuclear Security Administration's ASCI (Advanced Simulation and Computing) program. Once completed in October, the cluster will have a peak of 11.2 teraflops (trillion floating point operations per second).

ASCI oversees the monitoring of the country's nuclear weapons.

The other cluster, code-named Orange, will be part of the laboratory's Institutional Computing project, which includes such research as the design of antibiotics and simulations of wildfires. The 256-node dual-processor cluster will be the first Opteron-based system to use the InfiniBand interconnect, according to officials with AMD, in Sunnyvale, Calif.

The clusters are being designed and built by Linux NetworX Inc., of Salt Lake City. Both clusters will use the Opteron 244 model for two-way systems, which run at 1.8GHz.

"[The clusters are] continued proof points of Opteron's success in the marketplace," said Ben Williams, director of AMD's server and workstation business segment. "When you've got companies and labs like Los Alamos … it's an additional proof point that says if Los Alamos thinks it's good enough to do this [research], just think what it can do with your print and file [applications]."

Williams said that in the high-tech industry, new technologies are first embraced in the academic and research realms, then "waterfall" into the enterprise. Opteron has passed the first test, and Williams said he expects it will start making headway into the enterprise later this year.

<a href="http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1220701,00.asp&quot; target=_blank>more here</a>
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