AMD dual core gets major Linux World showing

ONE OF the interesting hardware stories is a series of boxes running as-yet-unannounced dual-core Opteron processors, writes INQ reader Don Altman, from LinuxWorld.

The vendors I saw displaying working systems using these included Cray, HP, Microway, and Sun. Below I'll try to describe a few of the boxes.

HP's contribution was the XW9300 mini-tower running dual Opteron 200-series chips with the ability to run dual-core chips with only a BIOS upgrade.. The motherboard is made by Tyan to an HP design. The box uses 800MHz Hypertransport through the 250 processors and 1GHz for the 252. The as-yet-unannounced dual-core chips were rumoured to be running 1GHz Hypertransport.

The box on display had dual-digital out NVidia Nforce 4 Professional 2-D graphics at entry level. Options include PCI-E Quadro NVS 280 for high-end 2-D and Quadro FX 3400 SLI for high-end 3-D. That allows up to four 3D monitors from the two Quadros.

Memory of up to eight registered DIMMS of 2GB each of the DDR-400 type is supported.

The box includes an integrated SATA II controller with Raid 0,1, or 0+1 capability and an integrated ULTRA 320 SCSI controller. It has three external 5.25" and 5 internal 3.5" bays. The usual I/O ports and integrated Soundblaster Audigy 2-ZS PCI are standard.

Networking is the integrated Nvidia GB Ethernet with an option for Broadcom GB PCI-e Ethernet. The power supply is rated at 700W.

Expansion slots were two X16 PCIe for graphics, one PCI-X 133 and two PCI-X 100 and one standard PCI slot.

As displayed, the box was running 64-bit Linux, although the literature states that "HP Recommends Microsoft Windows XP Professional". The box currently runs XP 32-bit and I was assured that it will run XP 64-bit as soon as it becomes available.

An entry-level configuration of one single-core Opteron, SATA, and on-board NForce capabilities starts at $1900. Prices go up from there as options and processors are added.

As an aside, the HP folks I talked with said they were unaffected by all the management turmoil. They said they'd been left alone, funding and staffing had not been cut, and they were pretty much on their own to work. As another aside, every time I turned around, one of the AMD folks was hanging on my every question to assure that I learned nothing much about their unreleased products.

Microway was showing its Navion-8 4-U box. It uses dual Iwill motherboards, each holding four Opterons. Each socket is capable of using the mysterious dual-core Opterons with only a BIOS upgrade. A dual-core-populated system was on display. The box has four hot-swappable 500W PSUs, up to 64 GB DDR 400 memory, five hot-swap SCSI of SATA drives. What's unusual is the heat management. The CPUs do not have huge heatsinks. The case drives air front-to-back with no perforations on the top or bottom. As displayed, it was running eight of the dual-core Opterons and 4 drives while only being warm to the touch. Clearly someone has done some good engineering here.

Microway was also showing a 1U dual processor, also a dual core capable box, using a PathScale HTX board to connect infiniband directly into the Hypertransport bus (bypassing the normal bottlenecks.) What's interesting here is that PathScale technology comes out of SGI and the old Cray corporation. I was assured that there is no problem interfacing with either the 800MHz or 1GHz Hypertransport and that the performance was very good for the processors and memory being used.

And that brings me to Cray. It is back. It was showing, at the low end, the XD-1 supercomputer. It, too, was based upon the dual-core Opterons. Each 3VU chassis holds 12 processors, up to 96GB memory and up to 1.5 TB disk. The memory has an aggregate bandwidth of 77 GB/sec. The chassis has a "peak performance" of 58 GFlops. and costs around $40,000. Compared with the Crays on which I cut my teeth, there are three zeros missing from the cost.

What's most interesting about these units is that they are rackable. Individual boxes in the rack communicate via 96-GB/sec (aggregate) nonblocking crossbar switches. (That's 8GB/sec between processors.) The 3VU chasses intercommunicate at 48 GB/sec. The result is a one rack supercomputer having 144 processors with a peak performance of 691 GFlops. By using the dual-core Opterons, that goes up to 288 nodes per rack.

Current Cray customers include Italian and US government agencies including the US Army and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The Cray folks I spoke with were enthusiastic about their come-back. As a former scientist who spent many, many hours on their old hardware, so am I.

The Sun multi-processor boxes included the W2100Z and V202 and V402. since they were closed there were no obvious photo opportunities. In addition to the dual core Opterons, there were a host of other powerful compute engines based upon Opteron technology. One interesting one is the Rocketcalc Saturn. It is a standalone box housing four dual-Opteron boards connected by switched-gigabit Ethernet. The boxes use the low-power Opterons, the 246HE or the 240EE. (As soon as a low-power dual-core Opteron becomes available, it should run with only a BIOS upgrade.) Each 14" X 12.5" X 24" box, in addition to the processors, houses up to 1TB Sata disk, up to 64 GB ECC DDR. The chipset upon which it's all based is the AMD 8131 having 10.6 GB/sec total system memory bandwidth and 8 GBps low-latency Gigabit Ethernet.

By using low-power Opterons, the boxes have a simple air-cooling system and sell for under $14,000 fully populated. They are aimed at compute-bound disciplines such as molecular modelling. Given their size and low weight, they are truly hand-luggable desk-top supercomputers. µ