Super processing power

The high-octane world of Formula One is the bleeding edge of automotive design, with engineering developments such as clutchless manual transmission -- allowing gear changes at the press of a button -- occasionally filtering down to commercial models. But innovation aside, one of the biggest benefits for the companies such as Renault that are involved is the sheen of glamour an association with motorsport adds to its road-going models.

Lacking most of the sparkle and all of the danger, the computing industry's equivalent to Formula One are the monstrous supercomputing projects undertaken mostly in the scientific and technical arena. While these ventures often have worthy aims, and also lead to technical developments that occasionally filter down to enterprises, the real benefits for some vendors again probably comes from the kudos of being associated with a cutting-edge project.

It's no coincidence as chip manufacturer AMD tries to break into the enterprise server market with its Opteron processor it is also heavily involved in two of the most high-profile supercomputing projects in recent months. The first of these projects will see around 2000 Opteron chips utilised by Chinese supercomputer-maker Dawning Information Industry. The Dawning 4000A will be a cluster of machines running a Chinese version of Linux and will aim for around 10 teraflops of computing power.

When launched next June, the Dawning cluster should knock the 2,304-processor Linux NetWorx cluster at the US Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory off its third-place position in the Top500 list of supercomputers. The icing on the cake for AMD is that this 8-teraflop machine just happens to be the fastest on the list using chips from rival Intel.

Dave Everett, European strategic marketing manager for AMD, says while supercomputing projects have benefits in terms of innovation, they are also important in terms of marketing. "I am sure we do get some technical benefits but that's not our primary reason. These projects are very visible and tend to capture the public's imagination," he says.

AMD and Dawning are not the only parties to realise the benefits of some super-powered publicity -- the Chinese government is also behind the project in a big way. The best ranking achieved by a Chinese company in the top500 has been 43, so the Dawning project should help the country's government in its push to be seen as a technical innovator. China's urge to be seen as a techie country is underlined by it recently becoming only the third nation ever to launch a manned space mission.

"We are very excited to see that local Chinese enterprises like Dawning are actually turning the fruit of scientific research into industrial products for the benefit of many. We are happy to see their rapid emergence in the world of science and technology and winning honour for the country," said Shi Dinghuan, secretary-general of the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology, in a statement.

The second supercomputing project AMD is involved in sees the chipmaker working closer to home supplying the chips for a Cray system, code-named Red Storm, that is being built for the US Department of Energy. The supercomputer will contain around 10,000 Opteron chips and be capable of churning 40 trillion calculations per second (40 teraflops) when it becomes operational in 2004.

Red Storm is part of the DOE's Accelerated Strategic Computing (ASC) initiative to build systems that can, among other tasks, simulate nuclear explosions. But as well as the obvious benefits of cutting down on the need for real nuclear tests -- the project could be a PR coup for the US government in the same way the Dawning system will benefit the Chinese.

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