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PathScale Helps Boost Performance Of Sun's AMD Opteron Systems

PathScale Inc, developer of innovative software and hardware solutions to accelerate the performance and efficiency of Linux clusters, announced an engineering initiative with Sun Microsystems to jointly tune Sun's Opteron processor-based systems. This engineering collaboration enables customers to achieve greater system throughput, setting a new standard for application-based performance results on Sun's AMD Opteron-based systems running Linux OS. With the PathScale EKO Compilers, the new AMD Opteron-based servers and workstations from Sun posted record-setting benchmarks.

The PathScale EKO Compiler Suite has been widely adopted within the AMD Opteron user community. Pathscale compilers are specifically designed to exploit the AMD64 architecture and speed up application execution times. One of the first customers to take advantage of the superior performance of the technology provided by AMD, Sun and PathScale is the University of Chicago's Economics Research Center, one of the world's leading institutions doing research in economic modeling and analysis.

"We choose to deploy the combination of the Sun Fire V40z servers based on AMD Opteron processors and PathScale EKO compilers as our internal testing proved this offering to be the highest performance for our highly-compute intensive statistical applications," said Donour Sizemore, numerical analyst at the University of Chicago.

Recent Performance Results

Using the PathScale EKO compiler suite, Sun achieved the fastest SPECint_rate2000 and SPECfp_rate2000 results on the Sun Fire V40z server compared to any 4-way AMD Opteron processor-based system and compiler combination running on Linux, as of July 26. These results continue to validate PathScale as the world's fastest 64-bit compiler suite for AMD64-based systems.

"One of our priorities is to help customers solve problems. We do so by leveraging industry-leading technology to provide customers like the University of Chicago with the highest-performance AMD Opteron-based systems available, and giving them a choice of operating systems to run their systems on," said Lisa Sieker, senior director of marketing for the Network Systems Group at Sun Microsystems. "Sun strives for total system performance and the combination of AMD's Opteron processors and PathScale's EKO Compiler Suite are essential ingredients in achieving the industry's highest performance results with these new systems."

In actual test results, PathScale's EKO compilers also helped the Sun Java Workstation W1100z produce higher performance on both the SPECfp2000 and the SPECint2000 benchmarks than any other 1-way AMD Opteron-based system and compiler combination running on Linux, as of July 26.

"AMD has worked closely with PathScale for more than a year and we are impressed with the performance enhancements made possible by the PathScale EKO Compiler Suite," said Ben Williams, vice president of AMD enterprise and server/workstation business for the Computation Products Group. "PathScale compilers have been well accepted within the HPC community and have assisted us in extending the clear performance advantages of the AMD64 technology with Direct Connect Architecture."

"PathScale's goal is to provide our customers with the highest-quality compilers that produce the fastest possible applications code," explained Art Goldberg, COO of PathScale. "Sun's use of the PathScale EKO Compiler Suite increased the performance advantage of its new AMD Opteron-based systems."