The six-core AMD Opteron processor-based system "Jaguar" is the world's supreme supercomputer according to the Top 500 organization, which today released its bi-annual list of the highest performing systems in the world.

This mission-critical Cray XT5 system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) wasrecently upgraded from quad- to six-core AMD Opteron processors and delivers 2.3 petaflop/s theoretical peak performance and 1.75 petaflop/s performance on the Linpack benchmark.

“We have seen the trend in the HPC industry's move to multi-core x86-based supercomputing and it's clear that the six- ore AMD Opteron processor is the ideal choice right now for a world-class supercomputer," said Patrick Patla, vice president and general manager of server/workstation and embedded division at AMD. 

The supercomputer at the National Center for Computational Science in Oak Ridge, named Jaguar, now tops the 34^th Top 500 list of supercomputers with 1.759 petaflops. In the previous two lists, the Jaguar had already gotten quite close to list leader Roadrunner from IBM (the first system worldwide to break the petaflops barrier in summer 2008) – the difference was less than 4% Linpack performance.

According to Top 500 web-site, since July, the Jaguar’s number of compute cores has been increased from 129600 to 224162 and – what’s substantial – it has been equipped with AMD’s new six-core processors ‘Istanbul’ and 2GB of memory per core. Each compute node features two Opterons with 12 cores and 16GB of shared memory. The whole system has 300TB of memory and 10PB of hard disc space.

Even though AMD powers the world’s highest-performance super computer, its rival Intel Corp. powers more super computers from the Top 500.

"Today, AMD also powers the world's highest performing system leveraging the incredible floating point capability of AMD GPUs and bringing the vision of ATI Stream technology to life.  Our OEM customers and the global institutions engaged in cutting-edge research and industrial HPC understand that a truly balanced system helps advance their work and provide an upgrade path to the future," added Mr. Patla.

Tags: AMD, Opteron, Istanbul, 45nm