AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced that The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) has deployed SeaMicro SM15000-OP™ servers with a combined 1,024 AMD Opteron™ processor cores in 20 rack units (35 inches of space). These servers are the foundational infrastructure for a new computing cloud, powered by OpenStack, and will be used for cutting edge research and computational biology – creating a powerful cloud computing infrastructure that will advance research in multiple engineering and science disciplines.

Research projects today increasingly require inter-disciplinary collaboration, large amounts of data storage and advanced computational capabilities. Procuring and managing computing and storage infrastructure creates overhead that takes up valuable time and energy from a research team’s staff. With cloud computing, researchers are freed from the burden of managing IT equipment and can focus on their research. This new deployment, also featured in an AMD case study, allows the broader UTSA community to realize the benefits of cloud computing by making it more widely available and easier to use.

“World class computing advances UTSA’s cutting edge research and discovery of new knowledge,” said C. Mauli Agrawal, dean, UTSA College of Engineering. ”As an emerging research university, this project supports our mission of providing world-class education, outstanding research, and economic contributions to the region.”

The computing cloud was a joint win with Rackspace. The SeaMicro SM15000™ server has been certified to be Private Cloud ready, and Rackspace Private Cloud Software will be deployed at UTSA to provide a flexible and efficient computing cloud. This will serve as the basis for a managed, private computing and storage cloud, accessible by the entire UTSA research community.

“As the computing backbone of UTSA’s cloud infrastructure, AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 server will provide researchers tremendous computing power and storage to help them make breakthrough discoveries in a variety of disciplines,” said Dhiraj Mallick, Corporate Vice President and General Manager, Data Center Server Solutions, AMD. “This infrastructure will help the university attract top talent, increase competitiveness for research funding, and advance towards designation as a premier research institution. Whether the project is to do a large scale study of proteins, simulate high throughput biochemical systems, or analyze computational fluid dynamics, the SM15000 server provides a powerful and flexible cloud computing platform.”

AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 system is the highest-density, most energy-efficient server in the market. In 10 rack units, it links 512 compute cores, 160 gigabits of I/O networking, more than five petabytes of storage with a 1.28 terabyte high-performance supercompute fabric, called Freedom™ Fabric. The SM15000 server eliminates top-of-rack switches, terminal servers, hundreds of cables and thousands of unnecessary components for a more efficient and simple operational environment.

AMD’s SeaMicro server product family currently supports the next generation AMD Opteron™ (“Piledriver”) processor, Intel® Xeon® E3-1260L (“Sandy Bridge”) and E3-1265Lv2 (“Ivy Bridge”) and Intel® Atom™ N570 processors. The SeaMicro SM15000 system also supports the Freedom Fabric Storage products, enabling a single system to connect with more than five petabytes of storage capacity in two racks. This approach delivers the benefits of expensive and complex solutions such as network attached storage (NAS) and storage area networking (SAN) with the simplicity and low cost of direct attached storage.