April 17, 2012
Intel’s MIC processor has faced some criticism about the narrow audience the architecture is aimed at, namely users of high performance computing. A recent development may blunt some of those critiques, as the company’s manycore processors may find themselves powering generic business applications.
A Businesscloud9 article points to Intel’s European Software Conference in Istanbul, in which much of the conversation centered on parallel processing. Part of the discussion there had one Intel exec, Levent Akyill, Manager of the Technical Consulting Team with the company’s Software and Services Group, talking about commercial applications for its upcoming MIC product, Knights Corner.
A direct answer to NVIDIA’s Tesla, Intel makes claim that the MIC chip is easier to program than GPUs. Although that’s debatable, Intel’s clout in the enterprise is not. The company has deep partnerships with OEMs and ISVs that develop the server hardware and parallel software, respectively, for a range of enterprise and web-based businesses.
Since more and more of those applications are being parallelized, Intel is thinking it might entice some of those potential customers to consider a MIC processor for their workloads. The article elaborates on this a bit:
[T]he languages that are best suited to parallel processing, such as C++ and C#, are now finding a strong foothold in the world of business – and this is likely to grow as Cloud delivered services become more widespread and prominent. Both are, for example, already widely used in the development of web-based applications.
Apparently there was also some discussion at the conference about using the MIC as a stand-alone processor rather than a coprocessor attached to a CPU host. The idea would be to utilize one of its cores as the host driver, with the other cores devoted to computation.
Takeaway
Although the MIC was purpose-built for HPC, its manycore design could be utilized in more generic applications with a propensity to parallelize. Whether this is truly practical or not remains to be seen. Certainly, if Intel can find additional non-HPC markets for these chips, the business case for its manycore product line would be much stronger.
Full story at Businesscloud9
The Xeon Phi coprocessor might be the new kid on the high performance block, but out of all first-rate kickers of the Intel tires, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) got the first real jab with its new top ten Stampede system.We talk with the center's Karl Schultz about the challenges of programming for Phi--but more specifically, the optimization...
Read more...
Although Horst Simon was named Deputy Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he maintains his strong ties to the scientific computing community as an editor of the TOP500 list and as an invited speaker at conferences.
Read more...
Supercomputing veteran, Bo Ewald, has been neck-deep in bleeding edge system development since his twelve-year stint at Cray Research back in the mid-1980s, which was followed by his tenure at large organizations like SGI and startups, including Scale Eight Corporation and Linux Networx. He has put his weight behind quantum company....
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.