September 19, 2011
During the recent Intel Developer Forum (IDF), Intel CTO Justin Rattner discussed the swift drive toward many-core computing, noting that this is an important development for HPC as well as many other realms.
Among the demonstrations and previews of the “many-core age” to come, Intel’s CTO touched on the future of extreme scale computing. This topic gave the company a perfect opportunity to discuss their ten-year goal to create a 300-fold improvement in energy efficiency, moving power consumption down the scale to 20 picojoules per FLOP at the system level.
Intel’s Shekhar Borkar who works with DARPA’s UHPC project said that “today’s 100 gigaFLOPs computer uses 200 watts. By 2019, it should use about 2 watts, due to reductions in power required not only by the cores, but by the whole system, including memory and storage.”
IDF also provided Intel a window to discuss a concept chip, nicknamed Clarmont, which they say can operate at near threshold voltage and can scale from full performance to low power on less than ten milliwatts of power.
Rattner stressed that these and related developments at Intel wouldn’t be restricted to HPC—he pointed to a number of applications that showed 30 or more times performance improvements as the core count lifted to 64.
The approaching deadline for the Knights Corner chip will bring more than 50 cores into 22nm—sparking what Rattner calls a new age of processing and memory capabilities. During the address, Rattner announced new parallel extension for JavaScript and demonstrated a range of many-core applications and efficient designs that performed well on the power, processing and memory fronts.
CERN’s Open Lab engineer, Andrzej Nowak said that in his work at the Large Hadron Collider is made possible by use of approximately 250,000 Intel cores. CERN has invested in parallelizing its software with returns in the range of 40x times the performance they experienced before.
According to Michael Miller, “CERN has worked with Northeastern University to parallelize its software. The lab has seen a fortyfold performance improvement on a 40-core Xeon implementation. The company uses the compatible MIC architecture. Nowak ran an application on both a single core and on a 32-core MIC, noting that on its heavily vectorized applications, they were getting nearly perfect scaling.”
Full story at Forward Thinking
In quieter times, sounding the bell of funding big science with big systems tends to resonate further than when ears are already burning with sour economic and national security news. For exascale's future, however, the time could be ripe to instill some sense of urgency....
Read more...
In a recent solicitation, the NSF laid out needs for furthering its scientific and engineering infrastructure with new tools to go beyond top performance, Having already delivered systems like Stampede and Blue Waters, they're turning an eye to solving data-intensive challenges. We spoke with the agency's Irene Qualters and Barry Schneider about..
Read more...
Large-scale, worldwide scientific initiatives rely on some cloud-based system to both coordinate efforts and manage computational efforts at peak times that cannot be contained within the combined in-house HPC resources. Last week at Google I/O, Brookhaven National Lab’s Sergey Panitkin discussed the role of the Google Compute Engine in providing computational support to ATLAS, a detector of high-energy particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
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.
In this demonstration of SGI DMF ZeroWatt disk solution, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, discusses a function of SGI DMF software to reduce costs and power consumption in an exascale (Big Data) storage datacenter.
The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.