Guild Companies

The computer business might be maturing, but it can still be surprising. Advanced Micro Devices has launched the 64-bit "Hammer" server processors that will be sold under the Opteron brand name. While tongues have been wagging all around the industry for months that AMD needed and would get the backing of one of the big server vendors, it turns out that Big Blue is going to be the first to put its seal of approval on the Opteron.

Bill Zeitler, the senior vice president of IBM's Systems Group, was quoted in the official AMD press release for the Opteron launch saying that IBM was particularly keen on Opteron because it permitted customers to run 32-bit applications on the same platform as 64-bit applications, allowing them to transition smoothly to 64-bit processing, and went on to say IBM believed this was particularly useful in the high performance computing (HPC) market. Mark Shearer, the vice president for eServer products who was there for the announcement, in New York, on behalf of Big Blue, said customers had expressed a lot of interest in the Opteron's ability to support 32-bit and 64-bit applications on the same chip, and that is why IBM has decided to back it. He went on to say that high performance at affordable prices was one of the driving factors for acquisitions in the HPC market, and it was a key factor in IBM's decision to back the Opteron.

You might think that IBM is trying to pigeon-hole Opteron into the HPC space, and that appears to be exactly the plan--at least for now. Peter Ungaro, vice president of deep computing sales at IBM, says that the support of 32-bit legacy applications on a 64-bit X86-compatible platform is a real issue for HPC customers and that IBM definitely will start chasing deals with the Opteron machines in the HPC market--what IBM has been calling deep computing ever since the Deep Blue parallel supercomputer whupped Gary Kasparov in a chess match--first and foremost. The reason is simple. These customers have the budget money, they like Linux (which is ready on the Opterons unlike Windows 2003), and they have the most to gain from the higher performance memory that the Opterons have even when running 32-bit applications. When pressed on the potential for Opteron machines, Ungaro is non-committal. "You never know where it is going to go in the future."

It's hard to argue with that sentiment. No one knows, not even AMD. That's probably why IBM did not divulge any specific plans for using Opterons in its own servers at the Opteron launch. All Ungaro would confirm is that IBM plans to launch an eServer product using the Opterons and that IBM intends to put Opteron-based machines in the On Demand Supercomputing center it has established in Poughkeepsie, New York, to service customers who want to buy HPC capacity in a utility fashion.

There are a number of possibilities, the most obvious is to resell Opteron-based machines from Newisys, an upstart server company founded in August 2000 to push AMD machines. Phil Hester is the CEO at Newisys, and he was also the main architect of IBM's RS/6000 Unix product line back in the late 1980s and early 1990s and was also chief technology officer for IBM's PC unit. Newisys has managed to pull in $55 million of venture capital to back the company. It has a bunch of smart engineers and sales people from IBM, Dell, Compaq, DEC, SGI, Texas Instruments, and others on the team. And it is smart enough to outsource the manufacturing of its Opteron boxes because it cannot be a low-cost manufacturer. What Newisys doesn't have is a company like IBM pushing those boxes. Sun has been rumored to be thinking about selling the Newisys machines as well, and Dell has to have thought about it, too.

IBM could put Opteron machines of its own design, from Newisys, or a third party supplier into its xSeries line, or it could create special blade servers using the Opterons for its BladeCenter blade chassis. The latter seems the most likely possibility, given that HPC customers like the density and manageability of blade servers compared to racks of standalone servers. IBM has no intention of letting the cat out of the bag regarding when these Opteron machines will ship. Ungaro confirms that IBM intends to ship these machines before the end of the year. Shearer elaborated a little at the AMD event, saying IBM planned to have a supercomputer utility offering as well as clustered Opteron servers that customers could install on their own premises.

Ungaro said that as far as platforms go, Linux was obviously the one most HPC customers would focus on with the Opteron platform, but that the beauty of the Opteron was that it can, like Intel's Pentium chips, support Windows HPC applications as well. Microsoft is starting to dabble in HPC, and has some big institutions like Cornell University helping. He said IBM definitely did not have any plans for supporting its AIX Unix variant on the Opterons, and also said the adoption of Opteron for the HPC market in no way detracted from IBM's commitment to its partnership with Intel, particularly in regard to the 64-bit Itanium processor family. He reiterated statements other IBM executives have made in recent months saying the company would deliver a version of its "Summit" chipset for the Itanium processors later this year; the Summit chipset already supports Intel's Pentium 4 Xeon MP processors.

Ungaro reaffirmed IBM's commitment to deliver a production version of its DB2 database on the Opterons, but was not at liberty to say what stacks of middleware and applications from IBM's Software Group would be ported to Opteron. A lot obviously depends on the availability of operating systems. Much of the 32-bit code that works on the Athlon chips should already work on the Opterons, if you believe what press releases say.