Quadrics Sets New Low Latency Mark On AMD Opteron™ Processors

New York City, New York -- 4/21/2005 -- Quadrics Ltd., a UK-based global leader in high-speed interconnect products for High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters, is pleased to announce the results of extensive testing of the Quadrics QSNet^II interconnect with AMD Opteron™ processor-based computing nodes. This testing builds on Quadrics’ endorsement of the AMD Opteron processor from its launch in 2003 with further optimizations for the architecture.

Using an AMD Opteron processor with Quadrics MPI software, Quadrics demonstrated an end-to-end MPI latency of 1.38 microseconds. This is a substantial performance advantage over current commodity and even proprietary-based network solutions. The Quadrics MPI implementation is fully compatible with Argonne National Laboratories MPICH 1.2.4, and incorporates many of the most widely-used features of the MPI-2 and MPI-IO standards. As such QSNet^II cluster systems can support a whole class of ISV applications for the fast-growing AMD64 ecosystem.

Lower latency is a critical factor in the scalability of applications and a major driver towards the continued exploitation of clusters for HPC. With the increased performance delivered by the new Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors and the speed of the Quadrics network, customers will be able to extract the maximum efficiency from their systems.

Quadrics is continually updating its drivers to reflect the latest OS releases associated with the major Linux distributions and in particular has optimized the features of the AMD Opteron processor to achieve this very low latency.

“The Quadrics interconnect products have led the market in performance for years, and the results with AMD Opteron processors demonstrate that we are committed to maintaining our technological lead. Quadrics continues to invest in hardware and software development to enable our partners to be able to deliver production level Linux Clusters,” commented Cristoforo Romanelli, CEO of Quadrics.

“The MPI results Quadrics has demonstrated are yet another proof point of the dramatic performance improvements made possible by the AMD Opteron processor with Direct Connect Architecture,” said Pat Patla, director, server/workstation marketing, Microprocessor Solutions Sector, AMD (NYSE: AMD). “From the launch of the AMD Opteron processor two years ago, Quadrics has shown its commitment to AMD, and our customers are continuing to benefit from this technology partnership.”

ABOUT QUADRICS
Quadrics (www.quadrics.com) is a leading supplier and developer of high performance networking products and software for massively parallel systems. Quadrics has its HQ in the UK and local presence in the US and Italy. Quadrics Ltd. is fully owned by Alenia Aeronautica, one of Europe's leading corporations and part of the Finmeccanica Group (www.finmeccanica.com). The world’s leading vendors and system integrators as well as major supercomputing centres such as Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratory have selected Quadrics.

Trademark information:
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in several countries. AMD, the AMD Arrow, AMD Opteron, and combinations thereof, are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.