HPCwire: A Half-Year Retrospective

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

Leading HPC
Solution Providers

HPCwire >> Blogs

Blog: From the Editor

From the Editor | Main Blog Index

July 06, 2007

A Half-Year Retrospective

Now that we're at the halfway mark for 2007, I thought I'd take a look back at the first six months of the year and try to highlight the most significant HPC stories of the year. In chronological order:

1. Less than four weeks into the new year, Sun and Intel became best buddies, announcing that there would be a broad partnership between the two companies. Up until that point, Sun used only AMD technology in their x86-based boxes. Under the new arrangement, Sun will add Intel Xeon processors to their workstations and servers, alongside their Opteron-based offerings. Intel will support and distribute Solaris, Sun's home-grown OS. The Sun-Intel partnership seemed to foreshadow AMD's 2007 woes that accumulated as the year wore on.

2. Also in January, Intel demonstrated its "breakthrough" 45nm process technology, announcing an aggressive schedule to roll-out commercial products based on the new process. The first shipments of 45nm chips may come as early as Q4 2007. The new process technology uses hafnium to dramatically reduce electron leakage, an increasingly annoying problem as semiconductor process sizes have shrunk. IBM also announced plans to move to 45nm, but their plans to get the technology into production seem less aggressive than Intel's. The real loser here is AMD, who is still in the process of moving their competing x86 products onto the 65nm process.

3. In February, a Canadian tech startup called D-Wave demonstrated a prototype of a commercial quantum computer years ahead of what most people thought would be possible. The 16-qubit prototype didn't have the power to challenge convential high-end computing, nor did the demonstration convince skeptics that "true" quantum computing was actually taking place. Larger systems will be needed to do this. A 32-qubit D-Wave machine is scheduled to be available at the end of the year.

4. The most interesting high performance interconnect story of the half-year came from Woven Systems. They've developed a 144-port 10 GbE switch designed to create a lossless Ethernet fabric with latency comparable to InfiniBand. According to Woven, this is achieved at one-fifth the cost of other 10 GbE solutions. The switch does dynamic load balancing at the hardware level (in a custom ASIC) to provide high levels of performance. Woven predicted general availability for their switch in Q3 of this year.

5. At the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in April, Intel finally revealed its intent to develop the much-rumored GPU-like Larrabee product line. No details of the technology were revealed at IDF, but Intel characterized Larrabee as a "highly parallel, IA-based programmable architecture" designed to scale to teraflop-level performance. While not calling this manycore architecture a GPU, Intel appears to be aiming Larrabee products at both visualization applications and vector processing/scientific computing.

6. While multicore/manycore is the current megatrend in computing, researchers at the University of Texas think there's a lot to be gained from instruction-level concurrency. In May, after years of research and development, the Texas team released a prototype of their TRIPS (Tera-op Reliable Intelligently adaptive Processing Systems) microprocessor. The chip is meant to dynamically adapt to the type of application being run, whether or not the particular workload contains inherent parallelism. At a time when everyone is singing the same multicore tune, it's refreshing to hear a different song. The TRIPS prototype demonstration was meant to solicit interest from commercial chipmakers. Anyone out there willing to tackle a new instruction set?

7. In early June, PeakStream was acquired by Google. PeakStream was one of two startup companies that offered a high-level stream computing development platform for multicore architectures. The other one, RapidMind Inc., had just launched its competing offering two weeks prior to the PeakStream acquisition. Both products offered a software development environment for developing stream computing applications for x86, Cell and GPU platforms. There was a wide variety of speculation on what Google intended to do with PeakStream technology (I offered my own two cents).

8. Later in June, NVIDIA launched Tesla, a GPU product line targeted specificially for the high performance technical computing market. The first Tesla products were essentially repackaged Quadro GPUs targeted for HPC workstations and servers. The company's CUDA C compiler environment provides programmers with access to the general purpose computing features of the GPU hardware, giving NVIDIA a complete end-to-end offering for high performance computing. By the end of the year, NVIDIA plans to implement double precision floating point in the new Tesla offerings.

9. June was a busy month. At the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Germany, IBM previewed its Blue Gene/L successor -- Blue Gene/P. This second-generation architecture is designed to be able to scale well into petaflop territory. Using quad-core PowerPC chips, bumping the speed in the CPUs, and generally improving the system interconnect, the new architecture more than doubles the compute power of the Blue Gene/L generation. The first deployment of a Blue Gene/P will be a sub-petaflop system at Argonne National Laboratory this fall.

10. A plethora of other HPC industry news came out at ISC. Maybe the most significant was Sun Microsystems's formal return to the capability supercomputing arena. The company announced its Sun Constellation product line, which, like Blue Gene/P, is capable of petaflop levels of performance. Unlike Cray or IBM, who use proprietary system interconnects to link processors together, Sun is using a souped-up InfiniBand switch and a simplified interconnect topology to connect Sun Blade 6000 servers. The servers themselves can be based on AMD Opterons, Intel Xeons or Sun's T1 processors. Essentially Sun is trying to do what many thought was impractical -- scale a cluster into a petaflop machine. The first Sun Constellation deployment will be at the Texas Advanced Computing Center by the end of this year. At around 500 peak teraflops, that machine will vie for the number one spot on the Top500 list.

By the way, over at Tabor Research, Addison Snell offers his top three picks of the most important HPC announcements leading up to (and during) last week's International Supercomputing Conference. So for an analyst's perspective of what's important in HPC, check out the Tabor Research blog.

-----

As always, comments about HPCwire are welcomed and encouraged. Write to me, Michael Feldman, at editor@hpcwire.com.

Posted by Michael Feldman - July 6 @ 12:00AM

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

Michael Feldman

Michael Feldman is the editor of HPCwire.

More Michael Feldman

Feature Articles

Book Review: Petascale Computing: Algorithms and Applications

Petascale Computing: Algorithms and Applications, edited by David A. Bader, is the first book in CRC's Computational Science Series, edited by Horst Simon. Although the book is a collection of papers, Bader has done an excellent job of creating a compilation that holds together and covers a broad topic very well.
Read More...

The Week in Review

Cilk++ used in parallelization of the FP-tree algorithm for pattern mining; Istanbul benchmark results posted; and the latest on the NVIDIA Tesla shortage. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.
Read More...

A Trio of HPC Offerings Unveiled at ISC

Last week's International Supercomputing Conference (ISC'09) was a convenient excuse for vendors to announce a raft of new products, but three, in particular, stood out.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

Cloudy With a Chance of HPC

Jul 01 | GenomeWeb Daily News | The popularity of cloud computing in the life sciences community was on full display at April's Bio-IT World conference. Read more...

HPC From the Beach

Jul 01 | Linux Magazine | How can getting to the ocean help with HPC computing? Read more...

DARPA Investigates Extreme Supercomputing

Jun 29 | GCN.com | Agency issues RFI for "Ubiquitous High Performance Computing" systems. Read more...

Supercomputers Go From Biggest to Cheapest

Jun 29 | Computerworld | The bottom of the TOP500 reveals the coming revolution in truly accessible high-end computing. Read more...

CPUs Gear Up For -- and Some Avoid -- Hot Chips

Jun 18 | EE Times | Parallel software also takes spotlight at Stanford confab. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Building High Performance Computing in a Green and Modular Solution Building Block

Apr 14 | | Many HPC IT departments are feeling the rising pressure to deliver more capacity computing and performance while trying to reduce the total cost of ownership. This white paper discusses how an environmentally-friendly and open-standards HPC building block based computing system using flexible interconnect options helps address capacity computing needs.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Dell Expands HPC Access and Adoption with Intel Cluster Ready Program

Source: Addison Snell, GM/VP, Tabor Research; sponsored by Dell

Many organizations that could benefit from the use of HPC clusters find that it is complicated to get the systems up and running because of limited IT resources or the complexities of the clusters themselves. Learn how the Intel Cluster Ready program, for which Dell was an original partner, seeks to address this challenge for entry level and mid-range HPC users.

Video White Paper: Architecting a Better Network Storage Solution

BlueArc's Titan architecture represents an evolutionary step in file servers by creating a hardware-based file system that can scale bandwidth, IOPS, and overall data capacity well beyond conventional software-based devices. With its ability to virtualize a massive storage pool of up to four usable petabytes of tiered storage, Titan can scale with growing data requirements, offering a competitive advantage for businesses, researchers, or other enterprises seeking to better manage data growth while still ensuring optimal performance.

Webcast: HPC Development Solutions: Sun Studio & Sun HPC ClusterTools

Sun Studio Compilers and Tools and Sun HPC ClusterTools allow you to create high performance parallel applications for OpenSolaris, Solaris and Linux. Sun Studio Express 11/08 includes MPI performance analysis capabilities and full OpenMP 3.0 compiler support. Learn about all this and the latest in Sun HPC ClusterTools 8.1.

More Multimedia

Blogs by Topics

Blogs by Author

HPC Blogroll

Featured Events

July 08, 2009
Data Mining: Failure to Launch
WWW

July 13-16, 2009
WORLDCOMP'09
Las Vegas , NV
USA

August 24-28, 2009
Data Mining: Levels I, II, & III
Denver , CO
USA

HPCwire

Tabor Communications | Tabor Research | Tabor Publications & Events

Tabor Communications