The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing
February 23, 2007
Intel Outlines Its HPC Strategy
1 | 2 | 3 All »
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.
Page: 1 of 31 | 2 | 3 All »
Article Tools
Share Options
(Digg, Technorati, more)
Subscribe
Sponsored Links
New Paper: Parallel Computing Without Parallel Programming
Learn how domain experts can run VHLL programs like MATLAB® on a variety of high-performance platforms without low-level reprogramming and how to work with the largest datasets and complex algorithms without sacrificing ease of use or reducing productivity.
RSS Feeds
Feeds by Topic
- Applications
- Developer Tools
- Interconnects
- Middleware
- Networks
- Processors
- Storage
- Systems
- Visualization
Feeds by Industry
Feeds by Content Type
Top Headlines
3D Seismic Data: Taking a Smarter Approach to Interpretation
Jul 09 | Engineer Live | The demand for computational tools to underpin the 3D seismic interpretation process has never been more apparent. Read more...
Engineering Unemployment Soared in 2Q to 8.6%
Jul 08 | EE Times | Unemployment for U.S. engineers has reached record levels, according to government figures. Read more...
Gartner Adjusts 2009 IT Spend Downward Again
Jul 08 | Network World | Global spending for 2009 projected to drop 6 percent, for a total of $3.2 trillion. Read more...
Concurrent and Parallel Are Not The Same
Jul 08 | Linux Magazine | Portability or efficiency? Neither is guaranteed when writing explicit parallel code. Read more...
800 TFLOP Real-Time Ray Tracing GPU Unveiled, Not for Gamers
Jul 07 | Ars Technica | Japanese company builds custom ASIC to accelerate real-time ray traced rendering for the auto industry. Read more...
Featured Whitepapers
Parallel Computing Without Parallel Programming
Jul 10 | | Engineers, scientists, and other domain experts depend on the productivity enabled by very high-level language (VHLL) tools like MATLAB® and Python. However, as datasets grow larger and programs get more sophisticated, ordinary desktop computers can no longer keep up. The paper explores how to run VHLL programs on high-performance platforms without low-level reprogramming. Work with large datasets and complex algorithms without sacrificing ease of use or reducing productivity.
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.
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.
Newsletters
Stay informed! Subscribe to HPCwire email Newsletters.
HPC Job Bank
-
HPC Systems Administrator
McGill University -
High Performance Computing Systems Administrator
Idaho National Laboratory -
Solution Engineer- HPC
Dell Inc -
Parallel Programmer
Cardiff University -
Principal Software Research Engineer
Indiana University -
Post Doctoral Researcher - Exascale Stream Computing
IBM - Visit the HPCwire Job Bank
Featured Events
-
July 13-16, 2009
WORLDCOMP'09
Las Vegas , NV
USA
-
August 24-28, 2009
Data Mining: Levels I, II, & III
Denver , CO
USA