AMD's Opteron Ranks Well in HPC Benchmarks

[Steve]

AMD's 64-bit Opteron processor is proving to be a pretty good number cruncher, especially when you look at multiprocessing. According to a press release issued by AMD and Cray today, two Opteron powered Cray's - the XD3 and XD1 - both have leading overall results in HPC Challenge benchmark tests.

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.

"But what is the HPC Challenege?" I hear you cry. I guess you could think of the HPC Challenge as PC/3DMark for supercomputers. Essentially, it is a colleciton of benchmarks aimed at providing a means of comparing the real-world ability of high-performance PCs. It isn't just the CPUs on test, as memory and interconnects are stressed too. As you'd expect AMD are rather pleased with how their Opteron performs coupled with the on-die memory controller and HyperTransport. Check out the press release for more info.