AMD Opteron installations see a increase on the newest TOP500 supercomputer list.

AMD (NYSE:AMD) has announced that 30 AMD Opteron(TM) processor-based systems are listed among the world's highest-performing supercomputers, as determined by the TOP500 Organization (www.top500.org). Building on an impressive debut on the TOP500 list in November 2003, AMD Opteron processor-based systems appear three times among the top 20 on the most recent list.

The AMD Opteron processor launched in April 2003 to the anticipation of both the high performance computing (HPC) and enterprise IT communities and is the only server/ workstation processor to feature AMD64 technology with Direct Connect Architecture.

"The HPC community recognizes that the superior design of the AMD Opteron processor delivers tremendous performance gains on some of the world's most complex and demanding applications," said Marty Seyer, vice president and general manager for AMD's Microprocessor Business Unit. "AMD Opteron processor-based systems occupy the leading position in a number of industry-standard enterprise benchmarks including TPC-C(TM) (4P servers), SAP(R) (4P servers), and MMB2 (2P servers). AMD64 technology is on its way to becoming the preferred choice for enterprise and high performance computing."

"X86-compatible systems are the system of choice in the technical cluster market. IDC estimates that over 90% of installed technical clusters are x86 compatible including both x86 and x86-64 systems," said Earl Joseph, Research Vice President, High Performance Systems at IDC. "The overall technical server market showed strong revenue growth of over 12% in 2003, while technical clustered sales more than doubled from 2002 to 2003. IDC end-user research shows continuing requirements for improved price/performance; faster system performance; large memories; and software compatibility. The growing appearance of installed AMD Opteron processor-based systems on broad industry lists like the Top500 and IDC Balanced HPC Ratings is indicative of these trends."

"With the introduction of our Cray XD1 and Red Storm-based products later this year, both of which fully exploit AMD Opteron processors and HyperTransport technology, we expect to expand our leadership on the new multi-test HPC Challenge benchmark as well as the TOP500 list," said Peter Ungaro, vice president of worldwide sales and marketing at Cray. "In conjunction with Direct Connect Architecture, Cray continues to gain substantial momentum in bringing HPC to a wider market."

The TOP500 list is published twice yearly. It is based on the Linpack benchmark, which measures a computer's floating-point rate of executing linear equations and is expressed in Gigaflops (Gflop/s) or billions of floating point operations per second.

The number 10 supercomputer, built by Dawning and in service at Shanghai Supercomputer Center, comes in as the highest AMD Opteron processor-based system on the TOP500, operating at a maximal Linpack performance rate of 8,061 Gflop/s with a theoretical peak performance of 11,264 Gflop/ s. Also appearing in the top 20 are a Los Alamos National Laboratory installation in the United States built by Linux Networx at number 11 and a system at the Grid Technology Research Center in Japan, built by IBM, at number 19.

"The architectural design of the AMD Opteron processor makes it a popular choice in a scientific computing environment, especially as the trend toward clustering grows," said Jack Dongarra, Distinguished Professor at the University of Tennessee and author of the Linpack benchmark. "AMD Opteron processors feature fast data throughput for computationally intensive applications."