ACADEMIA

“Roadrunner” platform specification will deliver dramatic power and cost savings to demanding market segment

At the Open Compute Summit, AMD – a member of Open Compute and a leader in driving open standards -- has unveiled a flexible and innovative Open Compute Project server platform specification, codenamed “Roadrunner,” to enable power-efficient, cost-effective solutions. “Roadrunner” is specifically designed to meet the general purpose compute, cloud infrastructure, high-performance compute and storage needs of the financial services industry. This move is in line with the Open Compute Project’s mission of driving further innovation and greater energy efficiency in infrastructure technology.

Incorporating feedback from financial customers, the “Roadrunner” motherboard specification is intended to integrate the features that the financial services industry demands into a dense platform, stripping out unnecessary components and optimizing the most important ones. Using the AMD Opteron™ 6000 Series processors, which offer the highest memory capacity and bandwidth operation in the AMD family, “Roadrunner” is a feature-correct motherboard that is also extremely energy-efficient and slashes total cost of ownership (TCO).

“By working with the industry to move technology forward, rather than focusing on proprietary solutions, AMD has both strengthened and gained momentum through collaboration. AMD is once again leading the charge by driving the Open Compute initiative into new markets with our “Roadrunner” board specification, optimized for financial services,” says Lisa Su, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Global Business Units, AMD. “Moreover, the “Roadrunner” board is highly flexible and can be configured to support general purpose, cloud, supercompute, and storage processing workloads.”

"Roadrunner" is a single platform with two configurations: one for HPC and a second configuration that suits general purpose, cloud infrastructure and storage servers for a total of four applications. The specification currently includes the following features:

-       16” x 16.5” motherboard;

-       Component population options depending on target usage;

-       Flexible form-factor support including 1U, 1.5U, 2U and 3U;

-       Open Machine Management, cost effective options depending on requirements;

-       Supports traditional rack and Open Rack infrastructures;

-       Support for the full portfolio of AMD Opteron 6000 Series processors with highest memory capacity and bandwidth operation.

“Like the success and dynamics of open source software, open source hardware enables open access to a broad range of engineering and technology talent, and a new rate of innovation and standards creation,” says George Brady, Executive Vice President, Technology Infrastructure, Fidelity Investments.  “We are very encouraged by the commitment to open standards and flexible solutions that we see in the “Roadrunner” specification.”

More information on the Open Compute Project as the Open Compute Summit can be found at http://opencompute.org/. The Open Compute Summit will be live streamed at: http://on.fb.me/OCPSummit. Follow AMD at www.facebook.com/amd or @AMDOpteron.