Roadrunner, the top-ranked supercomputer in the TOP500, is ranked #3 on the Green500 List. This achievement further reinforces the fact that energy efficiency is as important as raw performance for modern supercomputers and that energy efficiency and performance can coexist. (For comparison, the last two supercomputers to top the TOP500 are #43 and #499 on the Green500.)

As an Innovation Sponsor, AMD will provide the lab with its latest products for testing securities industry workloads such as market data, analytics and execution. AMD’s multi-year commitment to the STAC Lab will enable customers and industry partners to design high-performance solutions using AMD products and to test those solutions using official STAC Benchmarks. STAC will add several AMD processor-based products to its "Racked-and-STAC'd" list, the inventory of hardware and software products ready for customer projects. This includes servers supporting the latest Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors in 2-socket and 4-socket configurations.

The benchmarks below have been done on a dual socket Opteron 8356 (so 8 cores at 2.3 GHz) machine. Our quad socket board is not supported by ESX, so that is why we limited our Opteron 8356 to 2 CPUs for now. The specific benchmarks below were done on Xen 3.2.0 which is distributed with SLES 10 SP2. Four virtual machines are running at the same time, and each virtual machine has 2 virtual CPUs which are firmly linked to 2 physical Cores. Two webservers, one Oracle OLTP test and one DSS MySQL test are all running in parallel on our dual opteron server. Each virtual machine has 4 GB of RAM and runs Windows 2003 R2.We will give a lot of more benchmarking detail in the upcoming article.

With the publication of the latest edition of the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers today (Wednesday, June 18), the global high performance computing community has officially entered a new realm—a supercomputer with a peak performance of more than 1 petaflop/s (one quadrillion floating point operations per second). The new No. 1 system, built by IBM for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory and called “Roadrunner,” achieved performance of 1.026 petaflop/s—becoming the first supercomputer ever to reach this milestone. At the same time, Roadrunner is also one of the most energy efficient systems on the TOP500. The 31st edition of the TOP500 list was released at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany. Since 1993, the list has been produced twice a year and is the most extensive survey of trends and changes in the global supercomputing arena. The Roadrunner system is based on the IBM QS22 blades which are built with advanced versions of the processor in the Sony PlayStation 3, displaces the reigning IBM BlueGene/L system at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Blue Gene/L, with a performance of 478.2 teraflop/s (trillions of floating point operations per second) is now ranked No. 2 after holding the top position since November 2004. Rounding out the top five positions, all of which are in the U.S., are the new IBM BlueGene/P (450.3 teraflop/s) at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory, the new Sun SunBlade x6420 “Ranger” system (326 teraflop/s) at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas – Austin, and the upgraded Cray XT4 “Jaguar” (205 teraflop/s) at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.