Appro, a developer of high-density, high-performance servers, today announced the initial sale of its recently launched Appro HyperBlade AMD Opteron processor-based Cluster Solution, featuring 10Gbps InfiniBand interconnect technology. As far as I can remember, this the first commercial shipment of Opteron cluster of a noticeable size.

Texas A&M University has purchased two Appro HyperBlade Clusters consisting of 130 nodes with a total of 260 AMD Opteron processors. This High-Performance Computing (HPC) Solution includes Appro BladeDome Remote Management Software and InfiniCon’s InfinIO 7000 Shared I/O and Clustering System. HPC configurations based on Appro and InfiniCon technology are claimed to be easy to scale. Appro says that new nodes can be added to this solution on plug and play basis.

Appro’s HPC cluster solution will support multiple research activities at the university such as hydrology, groundwater, and oil and gas reservoir simulations. Texas A&M’s projects were funded in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Well, AMD Opteron momentum starts to roll. A good news for the number two CPU maker in the world.