Presented by David Wallace of Cray Inc. and Travis Justilian of AMD (should have been Joshua Mora). The presentation is about Cray (XT6 Production Supercomputers) utilizing the new AMD Opterons for more performance/MFLOPS, as well as efficiency for a greener computing, and more.
Indeed the AMD features now more cores (up to 12), more cache (12MB), more bandwidth (via DDR3-1333), and more efficient (45nm). Live polls were carried out during the webinar, and about 53% of the audience uses Opteron-based solutions.
Before the webinar, I first browsed for info on
the new Opteron 6100 Series. I quickly saw the "Enhanced integrated memory controller supporting four channels of DDR3 memory". Initially I was thinking about quad-channel memory, but then I as I further dig through, Magny-Cours (the codename of the new opteron processors) are actually
two 6-core istanbuls in one package. So applying AMD's medicine against intel years back, this is "not a true and native 12-core CPU" but two 6-core CPUs (12 cores, two dies). Thus the integrated memory controller is not quad-channel but two dual-channel IMCs. Nevertheless, it provided the new Opteron 6100 series more than double the memory bandwith of its predecessors.
Going back to the presentation, the Cray is able to utilize the 12 cores with the use of
Core Specialization, which allows the user to pin a single core on the node to the OS and devote the remainder to application code. Plus now with whopping 12MB L3 cache, it improves performance by reducing the amount of time spent accessing data in higher-latency system memory. In addition to this, Cray has the new
Gemini Interconnect that directly leverages the HT connection, thus ensuring full bandwidth. Cray also has
CLE3 (Cray Linux Environment generation 3), which is an adaptive Linux OS that can scale up to 500,000 and more cores, and the
Cray Programming Environment.
I will share to you the slides in PDF as soon as Linux Magazine sends it to the webinar attendees. Cheers!
