After five years of shipping Intel Xeon-supported products for its virtual SMP platform, ScaleMP has added support for AMD's Opteron CPU. Starting in this fall, customers will be able to aggregate as many as 128 servers encompassing up to 512 Opteron processors and 64 TB of memory into a single shared memory system. The decision to bring Opterons into the fold was driven by customer interest in the new Interlagos Bulldozer processor that started shipping this summer.

ScaleMP, has been enjoying fairly steady growth since 2006 when it first launched its vSMP Foundation product. vSMP is essentially a software replacement for SGI's Altix UV SMP offering, but in this case using x86 commodity cluster hardware aggregated by ScaleMP software. As such vSMP can offer many of the advantages of its hardware competition, but at a fraction of the price.

In tests at Aachen University, ScaleMP aggregated servers (either Harpertown Xeons or Nehalem-EP Xeon with QDR InfiniBand) outperformed SGI Altix UV (Nehalem UV and NUMAline5 interconnect) configurations with 32, 64 and 128 threads. The application was an OpenMP-based shared memory application (in this case, an analysis of a 3D passive scalar field transported by a turbulent flow) written in Fortran.

According to ScaleMP CEO and founder Shai Fultheim, vSMP generally attracts two types of customers: those with typical MPI codes, but who don't want to deal with the complexity of cluster management; and those who have shared memory applications, but are looking to migrate to less expensive, industry-standard hardware. In both cases, the users are being motivated to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) either through less software complexity, in the first case, and through less expensive servers, in the second.

More recently, a third customer profile has emerged in which a single infrastructure is built to serve all applications. ScaleMP's vSMP technology lets them do that as well, by allowing multiple virtual SMPs to be built up and torn down dyanmically across a datacenter. That type of flexibility is particularly important when a customer's application set requires different sized systems -- CPU count or memory size.

Up until now though, it all of the underlying compute hardware had to inhabited by on Intel Xeon chips. By bringing Opterons into the mix, vSMP can now access a broader hardware ecosystem. "We believe this is a game-changer," Fultheim told HPCwire.

Support will extend to both the Magny-Cours (6100 Series) and new Interlagos (6200 Series) Opterons. But it was the latter chip that brought the customers running. According to Fultheim, starting at the end of 2010, he started getting inquiries about support for Interlagos. In particular a couple of "very significant customers" approached ScaleMP and AMD and basically told them if you build it, they will come. ScaleMP now has about 10 customers in the pipeline for the AMD product and expects more coming, thanks to some impressive attributes of the revamped Opteron.

Based on the new Bulldozer architecture, Interlagos should deliver very competitive performance. Coming in both 12-core and 16-core versions, the integer and floating point performance is expected to stack up quite well against the 8-core Sandy Bridge Xeon EP. A 16-core Interlagos can retire 64 floating operations per cycle, compared to 32 FP ops for an 8-core Sandy Bridge. Note that while the 8-core Xeon can also hit 64 FP operations with the new AVX floating point instructions, not all applications will be able to take advantage of AVX -- at least not right away.

Memory bandwidth performance should be competitive on Opteron-equipped virtual SMPs as well. Early ScaleMP tests with vSMP on Magny-Cours-based servers with the Triad benchmark (measuring memory bandwidth) yielded decent results. On a two-socket server, for example, the Triad run delivered nearly 52K MB/sec -- about the same as what is expected from the upcoming Sandy Bridge Xeons. On a 12-socket Magny-Cours SMP, that scaled to nearly 280K MB/sec. It is likely that Interlagos-based machines will deliver even greater bandwidth.

While no one expects the new Opterons to overwhelm Intel's upcoming server chips, Interlagos may be able to carve out enough of a market to make it worthwhile for ScaleMP. The fact that the company finally pulled the Operton trigger after five years of Intel-only support may portend happier days for AMD's new server CPUs.

Even without an AMD offering, ScaleMP seems to been doing quite well. They now have over 300 customers spread across 23 countries. According to Fultheim, they expect more than double revenue in this latest quarter, compared to recent quarters. While their biggest vertical (39 percent of revenue) is in higher ed/research, they also have respectable footprint in manufacturing (19 percent), and government (11 percent)

They've accomplished all this by hooking up with system vendors like IBM, HP, Dell, Supermicro, and Dell, among others, who offer vSMP-certified x86 servers. Last week, they added Fujitsu to the club, who certified a couple of its PRIMERGY servers for the vSMP technology. "We will continue to grow the list," says Fultheim.

They're also looking at adding additional microprocessor support for vSMP, although Fultheim would not say what was under consideration. Since the technology is processor-agnostic, ScaleMP just needs a viable business case to justify additional ports. Given that, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to see future virtual SMP machines based on IBM's Power7 chip, Intel's Atom CPU, ae ARM server CPU, or perhaps even the Chinese-made Godson processor.

A limited release of vSMP Foundation that supports the 6100 and 6200 Opterons will be available on October 1. General availability is slated for November 21. No pricing was announced.