This morning at around 1:00AM Manila Time, I was able to join a webinar entitled Cray Boosts Performance with New 12-core AMD Opteron 6100 Series Processor", which was hosted by Linux Magazine.
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.
Some additional info, the Cray Inc. holds the number 1 and 3 spots of the top 500 Supercomputers for November 2009, as well as 19 systems included in the Green 500 of November 2009.
I will share to you the slides in PDF as soon as Linux Magazine sends it to the webinar attendees. Cheers!
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