Intel unveils the first of its MIC chips, the 50-plus-core Knights Corner, and its Xeon E5 "Sandy Bridge" processor, both of which will help the chip maker in its push toward exascale computing.
SEATTLE-Intel executives are showing
off the first working samples of its Knights Corner silicon, a key technology
in the chip maker's drive toward exascale computing.
Rajeeb Hazra, general manager of Intel's
Technical Computing Group, held up a Knights Corner chip during a press
conference Nov. 15 here at the SC 11 supercomputing show, telling analysts and
journalists that Intel has some chips running test systems. He also later
showed off a test system running at the conference.
"They're in our labs and working,"
Hazra said.
Intel officials are using the SC 11
show to shine a light on two key parts of its technical computing push: the
Many Integrated Cores (MIC) initiative-of which Knights Corner is a part-and
the
new Xeon E5 processor, a fast-ramping product
that already has found its way into 10 of the systems on the list of the 500
most powerful supercomputers, which was released at the conference Nov. 14.
Both chips are examples of the premium
Intel is putting on the technical computing space, which includes
supercomputing and high-performance computing (HPC), Hazra said. Technical
computing has grown to account for about a third of Intel's overall data center
business.
The MIC initiative is designed to
address the increasing demand in the HPC and supercomputing space for parallel
processing. The drive within the computing community is toward exascale
computing, which will enable new and more powerful applications from a wide
variety of industries, from manufacturing to health care to energy. However,
power consumption is a key hurdle in that effort. Chip makers such as Intel,
Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia are looking for ways to increase a system's
performance while making them more energy-efficient.
Nvidia and AMD are using less
power-hungry graphics processing units (GPUs) as application accelerators,
enabling them to work with a standard CPU to boost performance and enable faster
parallel computing while keeping power consumption down. During his keynote
address at the SC 11 show Nov. 15, Nvidia President and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said
that, to achieve exascale computing while staying within a 20-megawatt
envelope, a system will have to rely on GPU accelerators.
Supercomputer users also are embracing
the idea of accelerators. Thirty-nine of the world's fastest supercomputers use
accelerators, more than twice the number that was on the
Top500 list in June. Analysts from Intersect360
Research say the accelerator push will continue, and currently Nvidia GPUs are
the dominant accelerator technology. However, they said, the GPUs will be
challenged by Intel's MIC in the years to come.
Hazra and other Intel executives are
saying their MIC initiative will help them achieve their goal of reaching the
exascale level by 2018, and will be easier than GPUs for researchers and
scientists to embrace because it will be based on standard x86 architecture,
eliminating the need for users to optimize their applications for GPUs.
The 22-nanometer Knights Corner chip
will have more than 50 cores and will work with the CPU to create a complete
parallel computing environment and accelerate the performance of applications.
The chips are expected out sometime next year, though Hazra was not specific
about when they will be released.
"We don't build chips ... and then
hold on to them for years," he said, declining to discuss the chip's
frequency or wattage.
However, Hazra said Knights Corner will
offer up to a teraflop (trillion floating point operations per second), equal
to the performance of the ASCI Red supercomputer-powered by 9,298 Pentium II
Xeon chips-when it was the fastest system in the world in 1997.
"In 15 years, that's what we've
been able to do, and that is stupendous," he said.
Robert Harrison, director of the
Institute for Computational Sciences at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in
Tennessee, said his organization has been testing Knights Ferry prototype
cards-essentially, Intel's platform development kit for the chip-for the past
three months with some solid preliminary results.
Harrison also said that despite the
efforts of vendors like Nvidia, he doesn't believe that most of the
applications that his institution had ported onto Knights Ferry would not be
run on general-purpose GPUs due to the cost and complexity associated with
optimizing the software for the environment.
Nvidia officials at the show said they
are removing the complexity barriers to optimizing applications for
GPU-accelerated environments. Nvidia, along with supercomputer maker Cray and
other organizations, on Nov. 14 announced OpenACC, with the goal of creating a
standard for parallel computing. The group wants to make it easier for
researchers, scientists and corporations to run applications in a parallel
fashion on heterogeneous CPU/GPU systems by enabling them to outline directives
for the compiler, which will then do all the work to optimize the applications
for GPU-accelerated environments.
Intel executives said their Xeon E5 "Sandy
Bridge" is already making inroads with OEMs, with as many as 400 designs
based on the chip in the works. The chip, which offers up to eight cores and
began shipping in September, is aimed at such workloads as cloud computing and
HPC applications. It will compete with AMD's 16-core Opteron 6200 "Interlagos"
chips, which the vendor officially launched Nov. 14.
Hazra said the Xeon E5 will offer 1.3
to 1.7 times the performance of the current Xeon 5690 across all HPC
application categories, and all within the same power envelope. Key
enhancements to the Xeon E5 include Intel's Advanced Vector Extention (AVX)
instructions and integrated PCI Express 3.0 support, which will improve
bandwidth and enable greater scalability.
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