HPCwire: Intel Outlines Its HPC Strategy

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February 23, 2007

Intel Outlines Its HPC Strategy

by Steve Conway, for HPCwire

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Intel has been involved in HPC for more than 15 years. HPCwire asked Stephen Wheat, senior director of Intel's HPC Business Unit, about the company's perspective on HPC as a technology and business market.

HPCwire: What HPC activities is Intel involved in today, beyond supplying processors to HPC systems vendors?

Wheat: Intel is both leading and collaborating on a range of worldwide HPC activities. Aside from developing processors, chipsets and memory subsystems, Intel also has a major platform orientation. Intel works with worldwide Fellow Travelers, which include hardware and software vendors, to deliver and optimize solutions for HPC users. Aside from the hardware platform, Intel makes major investments in software at the applications and middleware levels, including performance analysis tools and an industry-standard MPI implementation that independent software vendors can utilize to maximize their compatibility. Additionally, there is much collaboration with the operating system vendors to ensure the systems software is ready for the latest Intel technology.

HPCwire: Where does HPC fit within Intel's overall technical and market strategy?

Wheat: While Intel has been involved in the HPC market segment for more than 15 years, we have recently formed an HPC business unit. From the standpoint of technical strategy, Intel looks at the HPC market as two segments, high-end and volume HPC. At the high end, there is a technology incubation market for rapid adopters. Beyond that, there is a proven technology segment for the rest of the market. The traditional, high-end segment is much more tolerant of rapid changes and is open to taking advantage of the latest technologies. It can be much more adaptable than segments that are compliance-bound or have a certification process and find it harder to take on new technology. We work directly with the end-user communities in these segments to identify their goals and how we can help achieve them.

In the near term, we look at what product offerings we can add to our lineup, in conjunction with our OEMs and the technology they produce. For Intel, the high-end incubation segment is a place to deploy enabling technology in the near term, and also represents an investment in potential volume technology for the rest of the HPC market and broader production-oriented markets. Incubation is about working to meet the needs of rapid adopters in order to get a larger, more stable group moving to greater performance levels as quickly as possible. We try to help push the innovation downward; and the production, volume-market requirements act as positive constraints on the incubation technology as it trickles down. We're always mindful of what volume segments need as we explore the cutting edge.

HPCwire: Does Intel view HPC as a sector that could provide a worthwhile return-on-investment for the company?

Wheat: Yes. We see the HPC market segment as a growing and viable business opportunity. However, we rarely look at the HPC segment in isolation. HPC innovation quickly migrates into the enterprise segment. There are many opportunities for HPC to influence offerings in the larger markets. Providing a technology pipeline from HPC to the volume enterprise market gives us an opportunity to greatly increase the ROI of our leadership technologies that we first explored and deployed in the HPC market segment.

HPCwire: Is Intel making an R&D investment in HPC, separate from the company's R&D investments in other areas? If so, can you describe the goals for this investment?

Wheat: While we don’t break out our R&D investments, we consider the HPC segment a critical market for technology adoption. We continue to deliver new products and technologies that bring new levels of performance and energy efficiency to this market. An example of this is our new quad-core Intel Xeon processor. Another example is the 80-core terascale research chip that Intel recently announced. While this is not a product, it does demonstrate the type of research and development that Intel is known for.

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