HPC in the Cloud: AMD Buys HP Blade Servers for Chip Design

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November 27, 2006

AMD Buys HP Blade Servers for Chip Design

HP has announced that AMD has purchased several hundred HP BladeSystem c-Class server blades powered by AMD Opteron processors to support the development of its chip designs.

"HP's Linux-based BladeSystem solution's integrated consoles and power control help us to manage more servers without increasing our staff," said Mike Lowe, director, Chipset Engineering, AMD. "These new systems help AMD take advantage of the latest HP and AMD high-performance and power-saving technologies and dramatically increase the density of our world-class engineering design compute cluster to enable us to bring new generations of chip designs to market efficiently and cost-effectively."

AMD's new infrastructure is its first large deployment of blade servers in its engineering design environment. AMD is experiencing an increase in performance-per-watt of up to 30 percent in the new server blade-based environment compared to currently installed standard rack-mounted servers.

AMD's silicon design team will use the new systems for electronic design automation applications such as architecture, circuit and verification tasks on existing and future microprocessor design projects.

"Since its introduction in June of this year, HP BladeSystem c-Class is helping customers around the world move toward an automated, 'lights out' computing environment while reducing the costs and obstacles of a racked, stacked and wired environment," said Winston Prather, vice president and general manager, High Performance Computing Division, HP. "AMD is leading the way by implementing an adaptive infrastructure in a 17-inch enclosure that uses high-performing AMD Opteron processors."

AMD's engineering design environment is based on an open architecture run and managed with Linux and open source tools. The HP BladeSystem solution running Red Hat Enterprise Linux was proposed and implemented in AMD's Sunnyvale, Calif., and Boxborough, Mass., design centers by HP Platinum and Linux Elite partner, Dasher Technologies. Dasher, located in Aptos, Calif., offers integrated electronic design automation solutions and provided AMD with on-site system integration, management configuration and stress testing.

While the blades will be housed in AMD's Sunnyvale and Boxborough locations, they will also provide increased computing power to engineering teams in Texas, Colorado and India.

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