AMD Saxony LLC & Co. KG

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AMD is one of the leading microprocessor manufacturers in the world. Its European production facilities are concentrated in Dresden, at Fab 30, which opened in 1996, and at Fab 36, the company’s first 300-millimeter microprocessor production facility. In addition, Dresden is home to AMD’s Dresden Design Center (DDC), the company’s European development center, which focuses on the development of chipset integrated circuits (ICs) for future-generation PC platforms and the development and integration of advanced communication interfaces into other AMD semiconductor products.

To achieve these objectives, the DDC staff relies on compute-intensive computer-aided design (CAD) programs. As the DDC’s mission evolved, the number of daily CAD computing runs increased exponentially. The company’s existing resources-an AMD Athlon compute farm and a number of individual Sun workstations-couldn’t keep up. To ensure continued productivity, the DDC required an easy-to-maintain, flexible, high-capacity and easily upgraded system to replace the existing individually dispersed system of a single compute farm and desktop-supported workstations.

The center wanted to install an architecture that would facilitate the high computing performance levels it required, and wanted a system that could be flexibly dispersed and upgraded. Finally, in keeping with the company’s motto-"AMD uses AMD"-the upgrade had to utilize AMD processors.

To find a solution, the center put out a request for proposal (RFP), and Sun responded with a proposal for a highly available, high-capacity compute farm.

In 2004, the company installed 32 Sun Fire V20z servers, each fitted with two AMD Opteron processors and 4 to 16 gigabytes of main memory, which are linked via a gigabit network. Then in 2005, the DDC extended the farm, adding a Sun Fire V20z server with AMD Opteron processors, and five additional V20z servers, each with 8 gigabytes of RAM. The result is a balanced system that can be easily maintained and further upgraded.

Sun engineers required only a single day to install the new compute farm and deploy the system, which enabled DDC to immediately install its inhouse operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. A few days later, after DDC engineers made some adjustments to the processors, the DDC team was able to begin testing the first applications.

Today, the DDC's Sun-based compute farm allows simultaneous access by as many as 60 users, each requiring high levels of computing capacity. The Sun solution can provide additional capacity for particularly memory-intensive tasks, significantly enhancing the center’s productivity.

As a result of the implementation, AMD Dresden Design Center now has the compute power it needs to facilitate the design and testing of products, allowing the company to bring better products to market faster.