AMD Opteronâ„¢ Processor-Powered Cray Supercomputers Post Best Overall Results On HPC

AMD Opteronâ„¢ Processor-Powered Cray Supercomputers Post Best Overall Results On HPC

Two Cray supercomputer products that masterfully leverage the AMD Opteronâ„¢ processor and HyperTransportâ„¢ technology, the Cray XT3â„¢ and Cray XD1â„¢ systems, have posted leading overall results on the HPC Challenge benchmark tests, AMD (NYSE: AMD) and Cray (NASDAQ NM: CRAY) reported today.

HPC Challenge results are gaining importance as customers increasingly use them to help decide which high-performance computers to buy. For example, CSCS, the Swiss National Supercomputing Center, relied heavily on HPC Challenge results when it recently selected a Cray XT3 system with 1,100 AMD Opteron processors that will be one of Europe’s most powerful supercomputers.

According to CSCS Director Marie-Christine Sawley, “We chose the HPC Challenge benchmark suite for our recent ‘Horizon’ procurement because we can measure and analyze the characteristics of a given supercomputer architecture with it. It lowers the burden on the bidders, speeds up your procurement project, and still allows you to gauge the effects of a given architecture on your key user applications by mapping their characteristic requirements onto the individual HPCC benchmark results.”

In comparing customer-reported HPC Challenge results for three large-scale systems of about the same size, an 1,100-processor Cray XT3 supercomputer had the best scores on seven of the 10 “condensed results” tests, compared to an SGI Altix 3700 system with 1,008 processors and an IBM Blue Gene system with 1,024 processors. In the seven tests, the Cray XT3 typically outperformed the next-best system by a factor of two to five times, and was up to 17 times faster than the third-ranking system.

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