Los Alamos to Use AMD's Opteron in Linux Clusters

nuke-alwin writes "eWeek is reporting that Los Alamos National Laboratory announced it will use more than 3,300 Opteron chips in two of its Linux clusters. According to the article 'The key to Opteron, as it tries to gain traction not only against Intel Corp.'s 64-bit Itanium chip but also its 32-bit Xeon offerings, is its ability to run both 32-bit and 64-bit applications equally well.'"

Comments

The key

[mao che minh]

Not only can the Opteron power both 32-bit and 64-bit, but it also performs just as well as the Itanium in either environment. The Opteron is also far cheaper (especially when you compare the costs of 3,000 Opterons to 3,000 Itaniums, as most potential customers will).

Intel can't compete with the Opteron on merits alone. It will be interesting to see what they try next.

Re:The key

[arne]

Not like your enterprise is going to care which company is making more money.

Companies will care. They need suppliers that have the cash to remain around to give support and take responsibility for problems. Sure x86-64, wave of the future... unless it dies with AMD a year from now.

The problem with x86-64 is compilers. Currently I gain a factor of 2-3 using intels compilers of gcc (and several other compilers I tried) in AMD hardware. And obviously Intel compilers are not available for x86-64.

Lightning computer system from Linux Networx

[Chyeburashka]

Here is the LANL link to the story.

Still plenty of floor space in the new building.

The Real Story is Here

[LuxuryYacht]

Los Alamos to get Lightning computer system from Linux Networx

LANL

For more specific technical detail on the supercomputer Linux Networx is building for Los Alamos, go to
LNXI Newsroom

Errm...

[pr0ntab]

Yeah, and you also need to reboot your Pentiums to run 16-bit code.

It is just the state of a flag in a control register. In particular, see page 68 of
AMD's Opteron System Programming Guide.

64-bit mode is enabled with the flip of bit 8 of the EFER Model-Specific Register. Otherwise it defaults to 32-bit mode. OS designers should test/set this bit just before running a thread in the scheduler, or jumping into system code as it can only be modified by code running in ring 0. This is the same way people treated the Virtual-8086 (16-bit) mode bit in CR0. In fact, you can combine the protected-mode, virtual-8086 mode, and "long mode" bits to have a variety of register-size and memory addressing modes per thread.

Re:32 bit swapping to 64bit

[Anonymous Coward]

This is already possible gcc -m32|-m64; granted both the 32-bit and 64-bit libraries need to be available. 32/64-bit compatibility is supported in SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 (SLES8); and will be available in RHEL 3.0.

Debian developers are also working on a port to Opteron that does/will support 64 bit Kernel with 32-bit and 64-bit compatibility.

just toured Linux Networx today... wow

[dougnaka]

I saw quite a few of their new clusters ready to ship out. I had to constantly wipe the drool off my face while I watched them assemble 2GHZ dual Opteron boxes with 2GB RAM per processor. Their tech is impressive. They have their Ice Box control units and quite a bit of custom control/monitoring hardware that makes building your own cluster seem less advantageous.
They boast #3 on the worlds fastest super computers, so questions about Linux on the "Enterprise" should be easily resolved.
This Tom's hardware review of Opteron vs. Xeon is quite interesting to give a better feel for comparison to todays speeds.
It will be nice when we have some numbers to compare Itanium II direct 64 bit to Opteron, although it doesn't seem much can save the Itanic IMHO.

Re:32 bit swapping to 64bit

[Weirsbaski]

Sorry to be bringing up a MS product, but their new 64bit Windows will be able to run 32bit programs with in 64bit OS mode, but not 64bit programs in 32bit mode (at least from my current understanding of the new product line).

In Opteron, 64-bit apps cannot be run under a 32-bit OS. Opteron doesn't recognize code as being 64-bit code unless long-mode is enabled, and once long mode is enabled the OS must be 64-bit (because all switches to more privileged code also switch to 64-bit mode).

Being able to run 32-bit apps under a 64-bit OS was one of the absolutely required features for Opteron, however.

(yeah, I work at amd)

Al Gore helped make the public utility.

[Futurepower(R)]

Software failure: Slashdot's system posted my comment in the wrong position. Hopefully this will be posted as an answer to Jaysyn, under comment #6704329

My comment: That's right. In several email conversations, I questioned Vint Cerf about this, and he said that Al Gore was extremely important in making DarpaNet, a research tool at a U.S. government organization, into the Internet, a public utility available to all.

DARPA is the U.S. government's violence research department. DARPA is devoted to finding more efficient ways to kill people. In the beginning of networking computers together, there was no intention of benefiting anyone.

According to Mr. Cerf, Al Gore recognized the importance of a public computer network long before other public officials knew anything about computers, and made sure the public network had funding.

Some have called Mr. Cerf, "The Father of the Internet", but, as his biography says, many people were involved. Mr. Gore was the main promoter, "father", of the public utility we now call the Internet.