Advanced Clustering - Company Blog

Molecular Dynamics on AMD Opteron 2400 "Istanbul" and Intel Xeon 5500 "Nehalem"

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:26:35 +0000

We haven't seen any molecular dynamics benchmarks on the newest processors: AMD Opteron (Istanbul) 6-core or Intel Xeon (Nehalem) 4-core. To help us get a better understanding of the performance on MD code, I took a look at two of the most common MD codes out there: LAMMPS and GROMACS. My results are a little surprising!

STREAM Benchmarking: Intel Xeon 5500 "Nehalem" vs AMD Opteron 2400 "Istanbul"

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:00:00 +0000

In our last benchmark blog post we discussed the performance of HPL on the Xeon 5500 series vs. Opteron 2400 series. We are continuing this head to head comparission of the latest and greatest processors with the STREAM benchmark. Click below to read our in depth analysis of memory bandwidth between platforms.

High Performance Linpack on Xeon 5500 v. Opteron 2400

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 22:23:06 +0000

This year has brought big advances to the CPU industry with the arrival of the Intel Xeon 5500 series "Nehalem" and the AMD Opteron 2400 series "Istanbul". While many different benchmarks have been published comparing both systems, they all have seemed to fall a bit short in showing an accurate comparison of the two platforms.. The HPC industry standard for benchmarking is HPL or High Performance Linpack, on which the "Top 500" list is based. Many industry insiders look to the results of this benchmark as an insight into how their systems will perform.

GPUs; Not Just For Games

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 06:00:00 +0000

Users of HPC systems are always on the lookout for more performance for their applications. Some users turn to FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays, essentially a reconfigurable processor) to accelerate their algorithms but this options is time consuming and expensive. HPC users often look to the off the shelf market and in doing so found some kindred spirits: gamers.

It's a Small (45 nm) World

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 22:31:19 +0000

Today, AMD released the newest revision of it's quad-core Opterons processors. These new processors, codenamed Shanghai, mark AMD's first product to be built with a 45 nm fabrication process.

The Shanghai processors bring some updates to the older Barcelona products. First, the L3 cache size has been increased to 6 MB and the on-chip memory controller has been upgraded to support 800 MHz DDR2 DIMMs which increase memory bandwidth up to 17%.

Flexible Storage Server

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 22:07:07 +0000

Our clusters are tailored to each users needs but the off the shelf storage options were rigid and limiting. A server with a large array of disks would be able to adapt to most any use but requires expertise and time to adapt to a changing environment. Dedicated storage systems were simple to manage but limited by either performance or protocol support. Advanced Clustering's Flexible Storage Server provides a simple web based interface without limiting the user to one protocol.

BLAS and carbon footprint

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:21:43 +0000

Ok, so the subject line is a little tongue-in-cheek. The purpose of this post is to discuss BLAS libraries and power consumption. And what a giant amount of variance in power consumption there is among the Big Four BLAS Libraries (BFBL):

ATLAS
MKL
ACML
GotoBLAS

Hardware testing

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 19:09:43 +0000

Failed hardware can demote a productive cluster to a piece of data center decoration. At Advanced Clustering, we take many steps to ensure that all hardware (computers, switches, consoles) arrive in working order.

Upon the completion of assembly, each computer is verified to power on. Once powered on, each machine is programatically checked to contain the correct hardware including CPUs, RAM, hard drives, and add in cards. Breakin, our stress-test tool, is then started on each system. Each computer will run Breakin for 24 to 48 hours. During this time we see the largest number of component failures. Breakin's verbose display allows our technicians to quickly track down the offending hardware.

Blog Introduction

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:46:39 +0000

With the launch of our new website, and because technology changes soo fast and we'd like to do a better job of keeping you updated. So, we have decided to start a regular blog. We will use this forum to let you know of any new and exciting technologies, technical issues we've come across and product announcements.

The blog will be regularly updated by multiple departments in the company including sales, engineering, and technical support. If there are any specific topics you'd like to see covered, please let us know at info@advancedclustering.com.