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FREMONT, USA: Penguin Computing, experts in high performance computing (HPC) solutions, announced that the company has successfully installed the world’s first HPC cluster powered by AMD Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) at Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The system comprises 104 servers that are interconnected through a QDR Infiniband fabric. It delivers a theoretical peak performance of 59.6 TFLOPs. Penguin's new Altus 2A00 is the compute platform for this deployment. The Altus 2A00 was specifically designed by Penguin Computing, in partnership with AMD, to support the AMD Fusion APU architecture. It is the world's first Fusion APU system in a rack mountable chassis in a 2U form factor.

The unique AMD APU processor design combines multi-core x86 processing, memory controllers, a PCI-E interface and massively parallel GPU computing on a single piece of silicon.

The APU includes 400 parallel processing cores that can be leveraged for HPC applications through the OpenCL programming framework. Unlike conventional GPU server architectures, APU parallel multiprocessors share the same physical memory space with CPU cores. As a result, the programming model for APUs is simpler, bottlenecks for data movement between GPU and main memory are avoided and data duplication is eliminated.

Theses capabilities offer particularly compelling benefits when deployed in conjunction with low-latency RDMA interconnects such as Infiniband, as they allow for building efficient distributed GPU applications.