September 13, 2010
If you thought the demise of Intel's Larrabee graphics processor offering would be the end of the chip maker's high-end gaming aspirations, you might have guessed wrong. At the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco, the company is demoing real-time ray tracing for games using Larrabee successor, Knights Ferry.
In the demo setup, they're using four servers equipped with the Knights Ferry processor to render Raven Software's Castle Wolfenstein game, which was rejiggered to do ray tracing in real time. The four servers are connected to a laptop client, where the actual game is displayed.
Knights Ferry, aka the Many Integrated Core accelerator, is the software development platform the emerged from Intel's abandoned Larrabee product for the discrete graphics market, and has now been repositioned as a high-end parallel processor for HPC. The 1.2 GHz chip is made up of 32 cores, each of which can support up to four threads. The prototype card hooks into a PCIe 2.0 slot and has 2 GB of GDDR5 memory.

The demo shows a variety of compute-intensive effects, including light reflections and refractions, all being rendered in real time and streamed to the laptop. The images are being generated at 40 to more than 80 frames per second, at a resolution of 1280 by 720.
Whether this marks the return of Intel's interest in the high-end gaming arena, or is just a way for the company to showcase the performance of the Knights Ferry hardware, remains to be seen. Either way, it's a not-so-subtle reminder to NVIDIA and AMD that there is more than one way to deliver cutting-edge visualization.
Full story at THINQ
Contributing commentator, Andrew Jones, offers a break in the news cycle with an assessment of what the national "size matters" contest means for the U.S. and other nations...
Read more...
Today at the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzing, Germany, Jack Dongarra presented on a proposed benchmark that could carry a bit more weight than its older Linpack companion. The high performance conjugate gradient (HPCG) concept takes into account new architectures for new applications, while shedding the floating point....
Read more...
Not content to let the Tianhe-2 announcement ride alone, Intel rolled out a series of announcements around its Knights Corner and Xeon Phi products--all of which are aimed at adding some options and variety for a wider base of potential users across the HPC spectrum. Today at the International Supercomputing Conference, the company's Raj....
Read more...
05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.
Join HPCwire Editor Nicole Hemsoth and Dr. David Bader from Georgia Tech as they take center stage on opening night at Atlanta's first Big Data Kick Off Week, filmed in front of a live audience. Nicole and David look at the evolution of HPC, today's big data challenges, discuss real world solutions, and reveal their predictions. Exactly what does the future holds for HPC?
Join our webinar to learn how IT managers can migrate to a more resilient, flexible and scalable solution that grows with the data center. Mellanox VMS is future-proof, efficient and brings significant CAPEX and OPEX savings. The VMS is available today.