AMD Athlon MP Processors Drive Most Powerful x86 Cluster Supercomputers in Europe and Asia

"The AMD Athlon MP processor-based supercomputer, paired with our expertise in parallel computing, helps significantly shorten cycle times in our research programs including bio-computing, reactive flows, optimization problems, technical simulations and image processing," said Dr. Wolfgang Hafemann, HELICS Project Leader at the University's ICSC.

"Cluster supercomputers are increasingly recognized as the most cost-effective way of generating high-performance supercomputing," said Dr. Satoshi Matsuoka, Professor of Global Scientific Information and Computing Center at TITECH. "And, as one can see from the latest TOP500 rankings, the AMD Athlon MP processors provide the level of performance needed for compute-intensive scientific applications.

"The larger significance of these rankings is that we have demonstrated that a single university lab can achieve terascale performance," added Matsuoka, referring to systems capable of performing a teraflop, or one trillion floating point operations per second. "In the near future, I expect to see multiple labs achieving computing power on the order of tens to hundreds of teraflops, making new scientific discoveries possible."

"The potential benefits we can derive from this type of research are astounding," said Giuliano Meroni, vice president of Sales and Marketing for AMD Europe. "It's inspiring to see that, around the world, AMD processors are helping the growth of scientific sectors like bio-computer science, mathematics and chemistry.

"AMD is absolutely committed to providing high performance computing solutions for both scientific and industrial applications," said Meroni. "These accomplishments highlight how effectively AMD works with our customers, and the best-in-class results achieved by working together."

The HELICS supercomputer is 35th on the new TOP500 list, and TITECH's Presto III Cluster ranks 47th, marking the first time AMD processor-based systems have earned places in the top ten percent of the TOP500 rankings. Both systems use the Linux operating system. The most recent list was released June 20th during the International Supercomputer Conference in Heidelberg, Germany. (http://www.top500.org).