AMD Athlon Processor gaining global Recognition as supercomputing superstar

The Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan has built the PRESTO III, a 78 AMD Athlon processor-based cluster that will be employed at the Matsuoka Laboratory of the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center and Department of Mathematical and Computing Sciences. "The objective of the PRESTO series of Grid clusters project is to enable cost-effective solutions to empower the computational Grid, investigate effective software used for commodity clustering, and conduct simulation and application studies on the Grid for various scientific applications such as operations research, high energy physics, and neuroscience", stated Professor Satoshi Matsuoka of the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has helped fund a 32 AMD Athlon processor-based cluster node supercomputer located at UCSC. The UCSC supercomputer, developed and built by Racksaver Inc. through the assistance of Dolphin Interconnect, will be used to study collisional processes in the solar system, and run simulations of planetary dynamos, such as the one responsible for Earth's magnetic field. "The university's Earth Sciences, Astronomy and Physics departments now have the ability to solve complex research problems 24 hours a day, seven days a week on our own local research cluster", said Erik Asphaug, UCSC principal investigator of the new 32-node research supercomputer. "Also, we can now create, archive, and visualize our data locally, and this removes the data bottlenecks and enhances our student's educational environment."

Another 32-node supercomputer has been installed at the ParInt Research Group at Western Michigan University under an NSF-funded grant. Elise de Doncker, Professor in the Computer Science department at Western Michigan University commented: "The cluster has been very reliable and invaluable to our research efforts in parallel numerical integration, and for class projects in various advanced computer science courses."

"The Department of Computer Science at Calvin College is committed to providing its students with hands-on experience using cutting-edge technologies, including high performance computing", said Joel Adams, Professor of Computer Science, Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the location of an 18 AMD Athlon processor-based cluster. "The cluster will also greatly benefit our faculty researchers in their individual research programmes."

This trend follows AMD Athlon processor-based supercomputers already installed in the University of Delaware, the University of Kentucky, and theUniversity of Utah, and reflects a growing number of universities obtaining and benefiting from the use of powerful supercomputer systems based on AMD processor technology. Each of these systems employ the Beowulf Cluster design architecture, which involves connecting each processor in parallel to maximise speed and processing power while providing inter-communications between the processors and compute nodes, and use a Linux-based operating system.