HPCwire: SiCortex Responds to Intel's Release of Nehalem

Since 1986 - Covering the Fastest Computers in the World and the People Who Run Them

HPCwire >> Off the Wire

March 30, 2009

SiCortex Responds to Intel's Release of Nehalem

The call to reduce the datacenter's rapidly expanding energy consumption remains unanswered

MAYNARD, Mass., March 30 -- SiCortex President and CEO Christopher Stone says Intel's Nehalem Xeon EP processor addresses a performance bottleneck in previous Intel chip architectures but does little to address the industry's need for improved energy-efficiency. According to industry reports, datacenters are projected to consume three percent of the United States' electricity by 2010, doubling in less than five years. The "carbon impact"? According to a McKinsey study, emissions resulting from datacenters will surpass the airline industry by 2020*. Stone asserts that this problem is just too big to ignore, and unfortunately, it appears that Intel has. The impact is significant, as the processor will be used to power computers from Apple, Cray, Dell, HP, IBM, SGI and others.

Beyond the environmental impact, many datacenters are simply running out of available energy to power computing and to cool hot-running systems. In the same McKinsey study, it is estimated that "90 percent of organizations running large datacenters need to build more power and cooling in the next 30 months."

Under these circumstances, "The computer industry needs to make a bold commitment to reducing energy consumption at all levels -- from the chip to the system architecture to the datacenter," says Stone. "We at SiCortex have taken that need to heart, and have developed our computers from the silicon up to radically improve energy efficiency -- creating the world's most energy efficient systems."

Stone is referring to results posted in the Green Computing Performance Index (GCPI), a tool SiCortex developed in cooperation with industry experts to provide objective energy-efficiency metrics at the computer system level. Based on the HPCC benchmark suite, the GCPI compares a range of established high productivity computers on a performance/watt basis, yielding information to inform purchase decisions. The HPCC benchmark suite, developed by a team led by Dr. Jack Dongarra at the University of Tennessee, is a well-respected set of benchmarks that measure the full range of computer system performance. The GCPI will include Nehalem EP-based processors as soon as performance data is posted.

Nehalem's major improvement is in the integration of the memory controller on to the same piece of silicon as the processor, significantly improving the memory bottleneck as compared to previous Intel chips. This design is in line with what both AMD, an Intel competitor, and SiCortex have been building into their own processors. "Systems based on the new Nehalem EP processor should deliver improved performance on the desktop and for small clusters, but the new chip is unlikely to significantly impact the speed of large scale systems," said Jud Leonard, chief architect at SiCortex. "Memory bandwidth is important, but it is only one of three key elements in system design. Unfortunately Intel has reached the practical limit of processor clock speed, and QPI, their interprocessor communications solution, does not scale. The latter is the Achilles heel for thousand-plus processor HPC systems when it comes to delivered performance. Large scale systems built on Nehalem will continue to rely on external I/O interface chips and commodity switches to communicate, impacting performance, energy consumption and cost."

In spite of these shortcomings, will Nehalem sell? "Hardware manufacturers who have built on Intel have little choice other than to embrace the new processor," said Stone. "The need to overcome memory bottlenecks experienced by their customers is compelling enough for vendors to bite the bullet and pay the extra expense of the new chip." Is Nehalem the end of the line for this type of architecture? "The industry needs to pick up the pace of embracing new approaches to computation. We must address the pressing need to rein in datacenter energy consumption and costs," added Stone.

About SiCortex

Headquartered near Boston, Mass., SiCortex, Inc. makes the world's most energy-efficient high-productivity computers. Its proven architecture was designed from the silicon up to provide breakthrough delivered performance at the lowest power consumption in the industry. SiCortex computers scale from 72 to 5,832 processors running a powerful Linux operating environment. SiCortex systems are the compute-power behind some of the most important research initiatives at government agencies, national laboratories and academic institutions. For more information, visit http://www.sicortex.com/.

*McKinsey Report: "Revolutionizing Data Center Efficiency," November 2008

-----

Source: SiCortex, Inc.

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Feature Articles

The Week in Review

The National Science Foundation has awarded funding to four projects as part of the Future Internet Architecture program; and the 3PAR bidding war is won by HP. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

Intel Flexes Parallel Programming Muscles

Intel Corp has released Parallel Studio 2011, a set of four tools designed to mainstream software development on multicore x86 architectures. The update folds in a number of parallel programming technologies that the company has acquired or developed independently over the past few years, including the Cilk Arts and RapidMind technologies, and Intel's own Ct data parallel language framework.
Read More...

Startup Makes Liquid Cooling an Immersive Experience

There's nothing like a blazing hot summer to focus one's attention on the best ways to keep cool. That goes for datacenter operators as well, who are equally worried about keeping their servers properly chilled. While there is no shortage of innovative cooling solutions being proffered by various vendors, a new liquid immersion cooling solution from startup Green Revolution Cooling could end up being the best of them all.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Around the Web

Picking the Right Processor

Sep 03 | Should engineers take advantage of GPU computing? Read more...

HP, Hynix Start Memristor on Path to Commercialization

Sep 02 | Could see first products in three years. Read more...

TED Talks for the IT Crowd

Sep 01 | A hand-picked selection of video presentations from the TED conference -- because the next big thing has to start somewhere. Read more...

LHC Compute Grid Teaches Some Valuble Lessons

Aug 30 | CERN project adapts its computation and storage strategy as hardware gets cheaper and better. Read more...

Godson CPUs Groomed for Supercomputing Duty

Aug 26 | Chinese-made chip adds vector SIMD unit; delivers 128 gigaflops in 40 watts. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Effective Backup and Restore

Jul 29 | | Panasas storage solutions deliver high throughput with many concurrent backup IO streams to standard backup applications such as Veritas NetBackup™ or EMC® NetWorker™. Download this whitepaper to understand the essential elements for effective backup and restore: the tape subsystem, networking, file system workload and administrative policy.

GPU Cluster Realities Whitepaper from Platform Computing

Jul 28 | | As compelling economics and performance drive GPUs into HPC clusters, developers are scrambling to catch up. Download this whitepaper from Platform Computing to understand how to capture the benefits of exciting new GPU capabilities.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Are you drowning in data?

In this webinar you will hear about the current storage challenges facing the HPC community, how Panasas storage solutions provide exceptional performance, scalability, and manageability, and how you can achieve the lowest total Cost of Ownership with a system that installs and configures in 15 minutes.

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.