HPC Exascale Journey

Recently, the latest http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/13840.html > supercomputer (HPC) TOP500 list, from Japan's supercomputer "Beijing" (HPC K), with 8000 trillion times /sec (PETAFLOP/S) computing power topped the list, the last HPC TOP500 champion China "Tianhe A" is a second seat.

In addition to "HPC K", another champion of this HPC TOP500 is Intel. According to statistics, 77.4% of the list system uses the Intel architecture processor, in which the Intel Xeon 5600 series processor supercomputer from last year's 56 units soared to 169 units. In fact, Intel has maintained a significant lead position in HPC TOP500 from a processor standpoint, a "water champion, Iron Intel" compared to the fast-changing HPC TOP500 Championship.

But Intel's goal is not just that. "Through collaboration with partners, Intel wants to deliver a complete technology solution around 2020 to achieve the performance of Exascale (EXAFLOP/S) floating-point calculations for supercomputers per second," said Kirk Skaugen, vice president of Intel and general manager of data center business, Schhode.

"Supercomputers are not simply stacks of hardware to achieve a exascale leap. If you rely on the hardware stack, the first energy consumption will not pass. Today, for example, the fastest supercomputer in China, "Tianhe a", will consume 1.6GW of electricity per second of exascale floating-point computations, which is equivalent to 2 million ordinary households. Therefore, only from the hardware architecture to the programming model to energy consumption and other aspects of innovation, it is possible to achieve. Intel Company server platform product manager Chang said.

To meet this challenge, Intel and European researchers have set up three European laboratories, the aim is to achieve three main objectives: the first is to establish a lasting partnership in Europe; the second is to make full use of the results of European high-performance computing research, and to achieve exponential growth in computational science, engineering design and strategic computing.

From a specific product level, the Intel Integrated Public Core (MIC) architecture processor being developed is expected to lead the industry into the Exascale computing age. Compared to multi-core Intel Xeon processors, the MIC architecture processor will have a smaller kernel and hardware thread, and a wider vector unit, especially for highly parallel computing applications. Also, mic core products are all based on the IA programming architecture, which means that users can quickly migrate their existing High-performance computing applications running on the Intel Xeon processor platform to products based on the mic-core architecture, eliminating the pain of reprogramming.

It is reported that the first 22 nm of Intel Mic Architecture products (code-named "Knights Corner") will be launched in 2012, and the use of Intel's innovative three-tier gate transistor technology, the core number will reach more than 50. Intel is currently selling the MIC software development platform code-named "Knights Ferry" to a designated development partner.

(Responsible editor: admin)