New Opterons Headed for Supercomputing Stardom

By Michael Feldman

September 14, 2007

AMD’s public relations blitz for its new quad-core processors is winding down now. The company’s roll-out of its latest Opterons was welcome news for AMD’s OEM partners. System vendors like Sun, Appro and others were eager to announce their new Opteron-equipped boxes. The lack of an AMD counterpart to the newest Xeon quads created somewhat of a vacuum in the x86 server market, especially at the high-end. (For a more in-depth look at AMD’s new quad-core offerings, take a look at this week’s feature article.) While the impact of the quad-core Opterons in the overall server market will take some time to develop, their effect in the HPC universe will be almost instantaneous.

The new Sun Constellation “Ranger” supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) will be outfitted with quad-core Opteron-based blades this month. The Ranger machine is the result of a $59 million NSF grant awarded to TACC last fall. When deployed, the system will contain nearly 16 thousand of the latest Opteron processors — 15,744 to be exact. The folks at TACC are eager to get the system built so they can start running the kinds of scientific workloads reserved for the most elite systems.

With four cores per processor and each core rated at 8 gigaflops (for a 2.0 GHz CPU), Ranger is expected to achieve a peak performance just north of 500 teraflops. If the Linpack benchmark is able to utilize 75 percent of that capacity, which is not an unreasonable assumption, Ranger will hit 370 (Linpack) teraflops. That figure would best the current number one supercomputer on the Top500 list — the IBM Blue Gene/L system at Lawrence Livermore. With a peak performance of 367 teraflops and a Linpack rating of 280.6 teraflops, Blue Gene has been the top system on the list for the past two years. Now that the new Opterons are on their way to Texas, Blue Gene’s dominance may be coming to an end.

But TACC and Sun better hurry. The submission deadline for the November Top500 list is October 15. According to Tommy Minyard, TACC’s assistant director for advanced computing systems, they’re certainly going to try to beat the deadline. He says the first Sun blades should start arriving next week and all the hardware should be installed by the first week of October. Plenty of time.

Ranger is the first commercial deployment of the recently announced Sun Constellation system, an architecture based on the new high-density Sun Blade 6000 technology. While those blades may host Opteron, Xeon, or UltraSPARC processors, the Opterons have the best fit for high-density HPC systems. Just 3,936 four-processor nodes will be required to achieve half a petaflop of performance.

Next to the blades themselves, Sun’s new 3456-port InfiniBand switch is the most critical piece of the system. Only two of these mega-switches will be required for the entire 4000-node Ranger cluster. The InfiniBand switches will also provide a level of performance that will make the cluster act more like a true supercomputer. Minyard says that MPI latencies will be as low as 1.5 microseconds across two blades in the same chassis and only 2.3 microseconds across the entire fabric. That’s nearly twice as fast as what could be achieved in a typical InfiniBand setup.

TACC is already lining up applications to run on the new system. They’ve been compiling and tuning molecular dynamics codes using pre-production quad-core samples from AMD. Kazushige Goto, TACC’s legendary code wizard is tuning the new BLAS libraries for AMD’s latest chips. According to Minyard, Goto’s been able to extract even more performance out of the hardware than even they expected. These are exciting times for the folks at TACC.

Only slightly less fortunate is Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and their “Jaguar” XT4 supercomputer. Cray is still waiting on the quad-core “Budapest” chips from AMD so they can upgrade Jaguar to 250 teraflops (peak performance). Budapest is the single-socket version of the new quad-core Opterons, whose delivery was pushed back when the multi-socket “Barcelona” quad-core schedule slipped. The single-socket quads are scheduled to be released in Q4 2007 or Q1 2008 depending on who you talk to. These processors will be used mainly for single-socket workstations, but Cray needs bushels of them to outfit new XT4 systems that have been purchased by a few select government agencies and national labs, like ORNL.

The late delivery of the Budapest chips resulted in Cray lowering its 2007 revenue projections, which means the company will almost certainly not post a profit this year. Cray has apparently been promised an unspecified number of Budapest parts for 2007 so that it can begin shipments of quad-core equipped XT4s before the end of this year. Presumably this means Jaguar will get its quads in time for Christmas. But formal customer acceptance of the system and the associated revenue won’t occur until 2008. By late 2008, the one-petaflop Cray “Baker” system will be installed at ORNL. Baker will also use the new quad-core processors.

This is not to say the Opteron architecture will have a lock on high-end supercomputing. The recently announced Blue Gene/P, based on the PowerPC processor, should provide some stiff competition. Argonne National Laboratory purchased a 114-teraflop system, which will eventually scale to half a petaflop. Other Blue Gene/P systems were purchased by Max Planck Society and Forschungszentrum Jülich. Beyond that, IBM has designs on multi-petaflop systems based on the POWER7 processor. And all the HPC system vendors are looking at building machines from multiple architectures, using more exotic processors like the Cell, FPGAs, GPUs, and ClearSpeed devices to achieve even greater levels of performance. For now though, the Opteron is enjoying its day in the Sun.

—–

As always, comments about HPCwire are welcomed and encouraged. Write to me, Michael Feldman, at [email protected].

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion XL — were added to the benchmark suite as MLPerf continues Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire