IBM Sells Opteron-Based Supercomputer To Drug Giant

IBM on Wednesday announced it had sold a supercomputer based on Advanced Micro Devices' 64-bit processors to pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Meyers Squib, giving a boost to AMD's Opteron technology.

The supercomputer, a cluster of 64 IBM eServer 325 machines running Linux, each packing a pair of Opteron processors, will be used by Bristol-Meyer for drug and healthcare treatment research, said the two companies.

Key to the decision by Bristol-Meyer to go with AMD's Opteron technology was the ability of the supercomputer to run both 32- and 64-bit Linux applications.

"Businesses don't want to be forced to migrate their 32-bit applications to 64-bit systems if they don't have to," said Mark Shearer, the vice president in charge of IBM's eServer line in a statement.

AMD's Opteron can run 32-bit applications faster than chips from competitor Intel, and has been chosen as the basis for other supercomputer clusters being built by the likes of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratory.The cost of the supercomputer was not disclosed by IBM.