'Titan' AMD-Based Supercomputer Ranked Fastest in the World

AMD (News - Alert) demonstrated its commitment to higher performance computing recently by providing more than 18,000 of its Opteron processors to the world's number-one ranked supercomputer. This position actually marks the sixth number on spot for AMD-based supercomputers in the last five years.

Officially called the Cray XK7, but nicknamed "Titan," this supercomputer was cited in the latest list of the Top500 Supercomputer Sites, and is installed in the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Labs (ORNL).

"AMD's impressive results in the latest edition of this prominent list underscore our strong focus on creating industry-leading technologies that allow our customers to capture and analyze massive amounts of data for areas of science that will ultimately shape our future," said Suresh Gopalakrishnan, corporate vice president and general manager, AMD Server Business Unit. "Through employment of our technology, partners like ORNL allow AMD the opportunity to play a role in how some of the biggest challenges of our time are addressed."

The semi-annual Top500 Supercomputing Sites list comes shortly after the release of the AMD Opteron 6300 Series of server processors, based on the company's "Piledriver" core architecture. This latest revision of the popular processor family offers superior performance and scalability compared to previous generations, making it ideal for virtualized server platforms used in both private and public cloud deployments – in addition to big data systems and high-performance computing (HPC) clusters.

AMD also launched the AMD FirePro S10000, which it claims to be the industry's most powerful server graphics card, designed for HPC workloads, and of course graphics-intensive applications. Indeed, the FirePro S10000 is the first professional-grade card to exceed one teraFLOPS (TFLOPS) of double-precision floating point performance.

AMD is currently taking part in this week's SC12 event in Salt Lake City, where it will demonstrate its new server technologies.