For about five years, ScaleMP's virtual SMP technology has supported Intel's Xeon chips. Now the company's product is supporting AMD's Opterons.
ScaleMP
for several years has enabled customers to use its virtualization software in
their Intel Xeon-based environments. Now the company is vendor support for
Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron server processors, a move prompted in large
part to customer demand, according to ScaleMP executives.
Starting
later this year, high-end computing customers running AMD's
Opteron
6100 Series "Magny-Cours" processors-and the upcoming
Opteron 6200 "Interlagos" chips-will be able to use ScaleMP's vSMP
Foundation software to aggregate up to 128 servers encompassing as many as to
512 Opteron processors and 64 terabytes of memory, creating a massive
shared-memory system.
Most
of the interest in vSMP Foundation over the past few years has come from
organizations running systems powered by Intel's Xeon chips, according to
ScaleMP founder and CEO Shai Fultheim. However, with AMD's
introduction of its Magny-Cours Opterons last year, and the new Interlagos
chip, which is based on the new "Bulldozer" architecture, that is shipping now,
interest in AMD in the server world is
growing gain, Fultheim said in an interview with eWEEK.
"We
are seeing the demand [increase] in the last six to nine months," he said.
Organizations
are interested in the increasing price performance advantages AMD
is offering with its chips, including Interlagos, which will offer 12 to 16
cores per chip, he said. The Interlagos chips also offer significant
improvements in floating points per cycle, integer performance and RAM
capabilities per single server, as well as CPU performance and memory per
dollar, he said.
With
its support for Opterons, announced Sept. 20, ScaleMP can now offer businesses
the ability to aggregate 8,192 cores in a single system. The new Opterons offer
organizations advantage high performance at a lower cost than Xeons, and that
is helping fuel the interest, Fultheim said.
Gaining
the support of ScaleMP also is a big deal to AMD,
according to Margaret Lewis, director of product marketing at the chip vendors.
"The
ability for our customers to aggregate individual AMD
Opteron processor-based servers into a virtual high-end symmetric
multiprocessor computer with vSMP Foundation is a game-changer," Lewis
said in a statement. "Our customers can now easily build a cost-effective large
memory and CPU system out of up to 128 servers to help meet their
high-performance computing needs."
A
limited release of the software that supports the AMD
chips will become available Oct. 1, with general availability set for Nov. 21.
ScaleMP's
vSMP Foundation software is designed to enable businesses to create a single
virtual SMP system by letting them view
multiple commodity servers and allowing them to function as a single logical
system. The goal is to reduce the complexity and costs that are inherent in
traditional SMP systems. Until this support
of AMD's Opteron chips, ScaleMP's software
could only be used with Intel-based systems.
ScaleMP
has garnered about 300 customers worldwide since releasing is first product in
2006, touching on such industries as financial services, chip development and
defense to pharmaceuticals, life sciences and government, Fultheim said.
The
company's vSMP Foundation software is aimed at three types of businesses: Those
running clustered systems who are seeking easier cluster management
capabilities as a way of reducing operating expenses; those with shared memory
applications looking to move to less expensive systems running on x86 chips to
cut capital expenses; and businesses with a cloud environment that holds a
single infrastructure that runs all applications. The last category enables
greater flexibility, Fultheim said.
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