April 14, 2020 By Augie Mena
Lax Sakalkale
3 min read

Latest 2nd Gen AMD EPYC™ Processors to redefine performance for specialized high-performance computing workloads on IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers.

Today, AMD announced updates to their new 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processor family, including the release of the 7F72 processor—now the highest per-core performance architecture in the EPYC line-up. The performance of these new processors comes from a balanced architecture that combines high-power “Zen 2” cores, innovations in system design like PCIe® 4 and DDR4-3200 memory, and the AMD EPYC CPU architecture to provide clients with impressive system output for better real-world application performance.

In a time when our commitment to choice and flexibility for our clients matters the most, we’re pleased to note that IBM Cloud will be the first major cloud provider to offer these new processors on a bare metal server platform. The dedicated architecture is ideal for power-hungry workloads, such as enterprise-level data base crunching, multiplayer gaming clouds with worldwide reach, and fluid dynamics applications.

These are the top AMD CPU EPYC 7F72 dual-socket server platform features: 

  • 48 CPU cores per platform
  • Base clock frequency of 3.2 GHz with a maximum all-core boost of up to 3.7GHz
  • 8 memory channels per socket for superior memory bandwidth
  • Up to 4TB memory configuration support
  • Up to 24 local storage drives supported
  • Operating System support to be delivered includes Red Hat Embedded Linux, CentOS, Ubuntu, Microsoft Server
  • Monthly, pay-as-you-use billing

A good choice for IBM Cloud Gaming

The Phoronix Test Suite is a comprehensive testing and benchmarking platform designed to carry out both qualitative and quantitative benchmarks in a clean, reproducible, and easy-to-use manner. Recently, AMD ran Phoronix Test Suite’s benchmarks on IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers with the new AMD EPYC 7F72s. The gaming benchmarks selected cover encoding, compilation, Disk I/O, cryptography, compute, memory, JAVA®, eSpeak, and POV-Ray. The performance results shown indicate high, consistent performance across the board.   

Phoronix Test Suite performance results.

Computation fluid dynamics, OpenFOAM, and IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers

OpenFOAM® is a cost-free, open source, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software that solves a wide range of complex fluid flows, like chemical reactions, turbulence and heat transfer, acoustics, solid mechanics, and electromagnetics. We performed OpenFOAM testing on IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers with 48-cores powered by 2nd Generation AMD EPYC 7F72 processors using OpenFOAM v1906 and scalable motorbike benchmarks—scaled to 100x40x40, 130x52x52, and the standard DrivAer 32M and 64M models from the Technical University of Munich. The mesh resolution for motorbike benchmark can be increased or decreased to affect the accuracy. This, in turn, affects the compute time and was used to effectively demonstrate the scalability of various workloads, as seen below.

  • Motorbike 130x52x52: 1575.37 Elapsed time / fixed iterations
  • DrivAer 64M: 1366.79 Elapsed time / fixed iterations

See more rate times and learn more about this test.    

MySQL® on IBM Cloud Bare Metal Server featuring AMD EPYC™ processors

MySQL is designed to handle large databases and is considered one of the most popular open source databases with a large and thriving ecosystem. With its Client-Server connectivity, quick processing speed, reliability, scalability, flexibility, and security, MySQL server is well suited for the many tasks required to manage data in a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS).

Engineers again ran tests derived from industry standard benchmarks on IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers with AMD EPYCTM 7F72 Processors. The online transaction processing (OLTP) performance per minute was 2056699.0.

These results demonstrate how effective the combination was at optimizing the I/O throughput for database applications. The testing was done using 2 x AMD EPYC™ 7F72 (24 Core) processors, 512GB Memory and 4 NVMe Drives in RAID0. Learn more about this test.      

Getting started with AMD on IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers

AMD APYC 7642-based IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers are now available for configuring, pricing, and quoting inside the IBM Cloud Catalog

AMD EPYC 7F72 processors will be made available on IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers in 10 IBM Cloud data centers across North America, Asia, Australia, and more in the coming weeks.

For more information, visit the IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers page. To read our getting started tutorials or to explore security and software options for IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers, visit our IBM Cloud Docs resource pages.

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