Now, motherboard and server maker Super Micro and Otoy have teamed up to take the idea commercial as the Fusion Render Cloud, which will be based on the most recent CPU and GPU technology from AMD and systems from Super Micro. Specifically, the Fusion Render Cloud will cram 125 two-socket servers based on AMD's imminent "Mangy-Cours" Opteron 6100 processors, yielding a total of 3,000 x64 cores. The machines come in what Super Micro calls its pre-configured Super Rack setup, with 500 of AMD's Radeon HD 5970 graphics cards in the servers.

The Fusion Render Cloud hardware will generate 3,000 concurrent HD streams (720p/1080p or higher at 60 Hz, OTOY said) for streaming video games, high end CAD programs and full virtual desktops for all major operating systems, OTOY said. In a press release, OTOY also indicated that its service will supply an additional 12,000 concurrent SD streams at 120 Hz. However, whether those streams will replace the HD streams, as opposed to supplementing them, couldn't be absolutely confirmed.

Mainstream servers in the future could have a combination of graphics processors and CPUs in servers as applications take advantage of thousands of GPU cores, said Gina Longoria, director of the product management and workstation division at AMD. The company may provide CPUs and GPUs together in a server to run highly parallel applications, she said.

In Nov. 2009, TACC announced that the Ranger supercomputer had run over one million jobs in under two years. Since it entered full production Feb. 4, 2008, Ranger has completed over 1,089,075 jobs and logged 754,873,713.8 hours of processing time, with an impressive 97 percent uptime. The system counts 2,863 users across 981 unique research projects.

Jaguar, which is located at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility and was upgraded earlier this year, posted a 1.75 petaflop/s performance speed running the Linpack benchmark. Jaguar roared ahead with new processors bringing the theoretical peak capability to 2.3 petaflop/s and nearly a quarter of a million cores. One petaflop/s refers to one quadrillion calculations per second.

Also of note is the new Tianhe-1 in China which pairs Xeons with AMD GPUs. Yes, this is probably as big of news as the top placed computer as this is the first time I've seen a CPU/GPU box on the list.

Rounding out the top 5 positions is the new Tianhe-1 (meaning River in Sky) system installed at the National Super Computer Center in Tianjin, China and to be used to address research problems in petroleum exploration and the simulation of large aircraft designs. The highest ranked Chinese system ever, Tianhe-1 is a hybrid design with Intel Xeon processors and AMD GPUs used as accelerators. Each node consists of two AMD GPUs attached to two Intel Xeon processors.