Intel & HP Announce World's Best 4-Socket TPC-C Result


Aaron Spurlock (HP) and Noe Garcia (Intel) discussing how this record result was achieved using the HP Proliant DL580 G5 running Intel XEON 7400-series processors.

Transaction Processing Performance Council [TPC-C]

XEON 7400-Series World Record Results

Intel executive VP, Pat Gelsinger announcing world record performance results for XEON 7400-series processors.

Industry first 1.2 million database tranactions per minute on 8 slot IBM server.

Sounds like something I got to have for the BS database server

New Sun x64 Systems with Quad-Core Processors


Announcing the new Sun Fire X4140, Sun Fire X4240, Sun Fire X4440 servers powered by Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, delivering market-leading energy-efficiency, density, and scalability.

Microsoft, after spending decades paying no real attention to high-performance computing, wants to be an HPC player with the release of HPC Server 2008.

To me, Server 2008 is easily the best Windows server operating system ever. But a good, solid server is only the start for HPC. While HPC Server 2008 has all the right buzzwords -- high-speed networking support, cluster management tools, advanced fail-over capabilities, etc. -- it also has all of Windows' historical baggage of bugs and bloat.

While looking at the real price of software is always interesting if you're a CIO or CFO -- especially when it's Microsoft's maze of Enterprise Assurance maintenance agreements and Client Access Licenses -- let's get real. Windows often requires you to reboot for major updates. Linux doesn't. Let's say you need to reboot, as a matter of course, six times a year with Windows HPC. With Linux, you don't.

This is HPC, not your PC, and not your ordinary server. Six hours of downtime in a year, all by itself, is a major failure in HPC. I don't care what kind of sweetheart deal you're getting from Microsoft; there's no way you, or anyone else, can afford Microsoft HPC Server 2008.


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Visionman launches Nehalem Core i7 servers


A whitebox server maker called Visionman Computers now hopes it can carve out a new niche for itself, selling single-socket servers based on the desktop variant of Intel's family of processors codenamed Nehalem.

Visionman doesn't want to wait for the Nehalem Xeon launch in late March to get customers the benefit of the Nehalem architecture. So today the company launched the Ascerva ViXone7 family of servers, based on the Core i7 chips, with the first box in the family being a tower box based on the 920 processor.

The ViXone7 server has four hot-swap SATA drive bays accessible through the front of the chassis, and Visionman is configuring the box with four Western Digital 250GB SATA-II drives, which spin at 7200 RPM. The server also comes with 3GB of 1.3GHz DDR3 memory, a floppy drive, a DVD drive, an nVidias 8400GS video card, and a 450 watt power supply, all for a staggering $1,800.



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The New Era of Blade Servers

The Dellâ„¢ PowerEdgeâ„¢ M1000e Modular Blade Enclosure is a breakthrough in enterprise server architecture. Built from the ground up to combat datacenter sprawl and IT complexity, the M1000e delivers one of the most energy efficient, flexible, and manageable blade server product on the market. Flexible and scalable, the M1000e is designed to support future generations of blade technologies regardless of processor/chipset architecture. The M1000e is optimized for use with Dell's M600 and M605 blade servers.

Replace your server with Opera Unite


Walk through with Opera Unite, which is looking to replace your server needs with its browser. Share files, photo's and media as well as chat and host websites.

Intel Previews The Intel Xeon 'Nehalem-EX' Processor


Code named Nehalem-EX processors for servers, in production later in 2009 with system available in early 2010, will feature up to eight cores inside a single chip supporting 16 threads, 24Mb of cache and more innovations.

The Greatest Intel XEON Performance Leap in History


New World Record performance with the Intel XEON Processor 5500 series. Pat Gelsinger describes the historical performance improvements with the new XEON, code-named Nehalem processor.

Introducing the World's Fastest 1U Server


On June 1, 2009, NVIDIA announced the Teslaâ„¢ M1060 Processor. An integral part of the worlds fastest 1U computing servers engineered to meet the requirements of enterprise-class data centers, the Tesla M1060 processors deliver supercomputing performance while requiring less power and space. Featuring the revolutionary NVIDIA CUDAâ„¢ parallel computing architecture and powered by 240 parallel processing cores, the Tesla M1060 shatters your performance per watt expectations to help you to solve the toughest computing problems faster.

Boston puts 4 ATI GPGPU cards in a server





Based on Super Micro's SuperServer SS6016XT server, Boston Venom F1000-4 packs four AMD FireStream 9250 GPGPU cards. Each of the cards has 1 TFLOPS of single-precision and 250 GFLOPS of double-precision computing power, e.g. F1000-4 packs 1TFLOPS of dual-precision power (4TFLOPS SP).

The important part is that this server fits the 1U format, e.g. a standard 21U and 42U racks could see anywhere between 84 and 168 FireStream accelerating cards, making a very solid platform for supercomputer performance - 42U rack brings 168 TFLOPS of single-precision and 42 TFLOPS of dual-precision performance. After four GPGPUs are installed, there is one remaining expansion slot - you can use it for putting the 10Gb Ethernet card or an Infiniband controller. System management is already covered with on-board IPMI 2.0 interface [supports KVM over LAN].

You might be interested in power supply, currently the most efficient one in the industry. Super Micro's engineering team developed a 93% efficient 1.4 kW power supply.



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Xeons and Opterons duke it out


Impatient to see benchmark results comparing the performance of Intel's quad-core Xeon 5500 processors to Advanced Micro Devices' six-core Opteron 2400s on supercomputing workloads - and perfectly happy to sell either kind of box to its customers - cluster maker Advanced Clustering Technologies has put the High Performance Linpack benchmark through its paces on two of its Pinnacle rack-mounted, two-socket server nodes.


Here's what happened:


The Xeon 5550 box had a peak theoretical number-crunching performance of 85.12 gigaflops, and delivered 74.03 gigaflops on ACT's Linpack run. That means the machine delivered 86.97 per cent of the theoretical performance on the actual workload. The Intel box cost around $3,800 as configured, which worked out to $51.33 per gigaflop.

With six cores running at almost the same speed, you'd expect the AMD box to do better than this, and indeed it did. The Opteron 2435 machine had a peak theoretical performance of 124.8 gigaflops, and it delivered 99.38 gigaflops on the Linpack run. While this was only a 79.63 per cent efficiency, more is more. That's a nice right hook, and the fact that the Opteron node only costs $3,500 is a nice uppercut, yielding a much lower $35.21 per gigaflop.


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Video and links:

Introducing the Six-Core AMD Opteronâ„¢ Processor

Industry Analysts Discuss Impact of AMD Opteron Processors


Industry analysts discuss what AMD Opteron processors have meant to customers.

Four Benefits of AMD's ‘Istanbul’ Six-Core Opteron


The release of the 40-watt 6-core Opteron CPU, codenamed ‘Istanbul’, from AMD means servers with more processing horsepower and less power consumption. Businesses will be able to do more, spend less, and save the environment all at the same time.



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POWER7 vs Nehalem-EX: The 8-core battle at the high end

Just like Intel's ultra high-end server offering, POWER7, IBM's flagship CPU for 2010, is a huge die, large cache monster, immensely powerful on its own yet capable of being very well connected to many of its siblings to compose very large, well scaled multiprocessor systems.

How do these two processors compare?

Well, both are 45nm process behemoths with 8 cores per die, each with out-of-order execution and some degree of internal multithreading. The Nehalem-EX is expected to have 8 cores with 2 threads each, running at anywhere between 2.66GHz and 3GHz at launch in the next 4 months, while the POWER7 will have 8 cores with 4 threads each, running at up to 4GHz at launch sometime in mid-2010. So, POWER7 should be faster and more powerful from the raw hardware resources point of view, but at the cost of being half a year later to market.


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Intel announces storage- and communications-specific processor


The Jasper Forest enhanced Nehalem Xeon chip lowers system power consumption by 27 watts and is aimed at ultra-dense blades, VoIP, NAS, and SANs

Intel announced Friday it will be shipping an enhanced version of its dual-processing Nehalem Xeon chip that is aimed specifically at the data storage and communications market with the ability to natively create RAID and is integrated with PCI Express (PCIe).

The new Jasper Forest processors are capable of configuring storage as a RAID 5 or 6, protecting against single or dual disk failure, respectively.

"Nehalem cores are quite powerful, but customers still want to be able to offload storage functions to a core, especially when you get down into two-core and single core versions of processors, really simplifies the architecture," said Seth Bobroff, general manager of Intel s Server Platforms Group.




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AMD Unveils Three Chipsets For 'Istanbul' Processor: Each chipset is designed for a different kind of server: Low-power, high-performance, and mid-range.


Advanced Micro Devices introduced three chipsets that complement the company's six-core Opteron processor, previously codenamed Istanbul.

The chipsets, unveiled Monday, include the SR5690, SR5670 and SR5650, which are each aimed at different types of servers. The 5650 is more energy efficient and is geared toward low-power servers. The 5690, on the other hand, targets high-performance systems and the 5670 is for mid-range servers.

The chipsets will also support AMD's 12-core Opteron processor, codenamed Magny-Cours, which is scheduled for release in the first quarter of next year. Magny-Cours will comprise two integrated six-core chips.


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IDF 2009: Paul Ottelini Keynote -- Talking Servers


Watch as Paul Ottelini gives the opening keynote address to ~4K IDF attendees. In this segment Paul describes the "Democratization of Data". Check it out !

IDF 2009: "What's Next? -- Westmere-EP Platform"


Sean Maloney gives an update on the Westmere-EP Platform at Fall IDF 2009. The Westmere-EP Platform features the Nehalem Processors manufactured with 32nm process technology.

IDF 2009: "Sean Maloney Keynote--Introducing Two New Xeon3400 SKUS"


More from Sean's Keynote today at IDF. In this segment Sean shows off a new reference design for low-power, single CPU server modules.

IDF 2009: "Industry's First SR-IOV Demo with Generally Available Virtualization Software


Watch as Greg Scherer (Neterion) describes SR_IOV technology. No need to worry, Greg explains it all in plain English. Enjoy!

IDF 2009: "Nehalem-EX, Addressing the Most Demanding Workloads"


Sean Maloney (Intel) delivers his keynote at Fall IDF 2009. In this segment, watch as Sean describes some of the interesting features of the Nehalem-EX Processor. There is also a cool demo showing how Machine Check Architecture recovers fatal errors in real time.

AMD "Istanbul" Demo: 24-Cores Operating & Virtualization


The first demo shows "Istanbul" running in a 4P system with 24-cores in total. The second demo shows "Istanbul" running an OS with three virtual servers running.

Check out images here: http://links.amd.com/Images

Read the AMD@Work Blog: http://links.amd.com/FrueheBlog