Traditionally, most supercomputers have involved highly advanced technologies and staggering costs. But the University of Kentucky's KLAT2 (Kentucky Linux [AMD] Athlon Testbed 2) is a "Beowulf" computer, which strings together many PC's and unites them in common computational tasks. The key, according to Professor Dietz, is parallel processing---executing multiple portions of a program simultaneously.

How does the AMD Athlon processor fit in? Very nicely, according to Dietz. "The AMD Athlon processor has helped my research because it is the processor that proves our exotic supercomputing technologies, such as use of 3DNow!™ technology for scientific computing, really can yield spectacular performance at a very low cost."

Many computer users enjoy AMD's floating point performance because it improves the graphics of games. But Dietz looks at it differently. "It isn't just for games. Fast floating point is critical for many scientific applications and 3DNow! technology makes single-precision very fast. Moreover, the AMD Athlon processor not only has high-end double precision floating point, but also has a level of architectural sophistication that makes it easy to get high performance from just about every code we've looked at."

Supercomputers such as the KLAT2 are able to take on some extremely difficult tasks, including modeling car crashes, developing 3D models of nuclear explosions, and testing new drug products using computational chemistry.

However, until very recently, the cost of such machines was staggering. That's one reason the AMD Athlon processor powered KLAT2 is especially significant. Dietz explains that less than a decade ago, supercomputers cost more than a million dollars per GFLOP (1 billion floating point operations per second). Traditional mainframe supercomputers now cost around $10,000 for each GFLOP delivered. The strategy of using "Beowulf" clusters has brought the cost down to $3,000 per GFLOP. But Dietz's KLAT2, using 64 linked AMD Athlon processors, allows the University to get GFLOPS for approximately $650 each. "After all, the University of Kentucky's old slogan was 'A Tradition of Value,'" Dietz quips.

Professor Dietz has no doubt as to what he most appreciates about the AMD Athlon processor. "It's amazing how well the AMD Athlon processor deals with the problems of mapping old IA32 code into the deep pipelines that enable GHz clock rates. In fact, the AMD Athlon processor is so good at rescheduling code that we've found the majority of our most exotic code scheduling compiler technologies simply aren't needed."

Can the AMD Athlon processor help bring supercomputer-levels of computational power to the scientific and engineering mainstream? The answer is a resounding 'yes' according to Dietz. "Engineers and scientists can afford to have the supercomputer power they need dedicated to their work and housed within their lab, which is a huge qualitative improvement over begging or buying time on a supercomputer at a center."

The KLAT2, put together for a relatively modest sum, can perform 64 billion calculations per second. "KLAT2 is not only outperforming conventional supercomputers by a huge price margin, but is actually providing the same performance of conventional "Beowulf" Linux PC clusters at about one fifth of the cost." And the use of the AMD Athlon processor was integral to the breakthrough. As Dietz says, "The AMD Athlon truly is a generation ahead of other processors."