Today, AMD released the newest revision of it's quad-core Opterons processors. These new processors, codenamed Shanghai, mark AMD's first product to be built with a 45 nm fabrication process.

The Shanghai processors bring some updates to the older Barcelona products. First, the L3 cache size has been increased to 6 MB and the on-chip memory controller has been upgraded to support 800 MHz DDR2 DIMMs which increase memory bandwidth up to 17%.

Our clusters are tailored to each users needs but the off the shelf storage options were rigid and limiting. A server with a large array of disks would be able to adapt to most any use but requires expertise and time to adapt to a changing environment. Dedicated storage systems were simple to manage but limited by either performance or protocol support. Advanced Clustering's Flexible Storage Server provides a simple web based interface without limiting the user to one protocol.

Ok, so the subject line is a little tongue-in-cheek. The purpose of this post is to discuss BLAS libraries and power consumption. And what a giant amount of variance in power consumption there is among the Big Four BLAS Libraries (BFBL):

• ATLAS
• MKL
• ACML
• GotoBLAS

Failed hardware can demote a productive cluster to a piece of data center decoration. At Advanced Clustering, we take many steps to ensure that all hardware (computers, switches, consoles) arrive in working order.

Upon the completion of assembly, each computer is verified to power on. Once powered on, each machine is programmatically checked to contain the correct hardware including CPUs, RAM, hard drives, and add-in cards. Breakin, our stress-test tool, is then started on each system. Each computer will run Breakin for 24 to 48 hours. During this time we see the largest number of component failures. Breakin's verbose display allows our technicians to track down the offending hardware quickly.