Intel on Monday disclosed a version of its Xeon processor line optimized for supercomputers and announced a partnership with NEC to develop future supercomputers.
At Supercomputing 2009 in Portland, Ore., Intel unveiled a future version of its "Nehalem-EX" processor optimized for supercomputers. The six-core chip will run at higher speeds than eight-core versions of the Nehalem-EX processors and will offer advantages for supercomputer specific tasks, Intel said in a statement. Intel also refers to supercomputing as high-performance computing, or HPC.
The chip architecture will offer greater memory speeds and capacity and will allow customers to build single computers or "nodes" with up to 256 such processors, according to Intel. This will be available next year, Intel said.
Intel said Monday that four out of every five supercomputers on the Top500 list published Monday are powered by Intel processors.
Intel also announced that it is partnering with Japan's NEC--that country's largest supercomputer vendor--to jointly develop technologies "that will push the boundaries of supercomputing performance," according to a joint statement.
NEC will use the technologies in future supercomputers based on the Intel Xeon processor and other technologies such as AVX (Advanced Vector Extensions), an extension to Intel's x86 instruction set architecture.
AVX will be used with Intel's upcoming Sandy Bridge microarchitecture due in 2011, according to Intel.
"With NEC further innovating on Intel Xeon processor-based systems, Intel is poised to bring Intel Xeon processor performance to an even wider supercomputing audience, " said Richard Dracott, general manager of Intel's High Performance Computing Group, in a statement.
Fumihiko Hisamitsu, general manager of HPC Division at NEC, said: "NEC's substantial experience in the development of vector processing systems...is a natural fit for taking Intel architecture further into new markets."
A vector processor design can perform operations on multiple data elements simultaneously. Intel Xeon chips are good at scalar processing, which handles one data item at a time.
The initial focus of the collaboration will be the development of technology to boost the memory speed and scalability--the latter refers to expanding a system to increase performance or capacity. "Such enhancements are intended to benefit systems targeting not only the very high end of the scientific computing market segment, but also to benefit smaller HPC installations," the two companies said.
NEC will also continue to sell its existing SX vector processor-based products. NEC, for example, currently markets the SX-9 supercomputer.
As Intel prepares to invade Nvidia turf, large companies at the Intel server chip rollout Monday stated--in some cases quite objectively--what graphics chip suppliers need to do to make this technology more palatable for high-performance computing.
Lincoln Wallen, head of research and development at DreamWorks Animation
(Credit: Screen capture by Brooke Crothers)Besides competing in the gaming graphics market, Intel is eying large high-performance computing customers such as Dreamworks Animation (whose "Monsters vs. Aliens" opened last weekend to large box office numbers) for its future Larrabee graphics chip.
Nvidia is already a player in the so-called General Purpose GPU space, which applies graphics processing units (GPUs) to high-performance computing. As described by Nvidia, high-performance computing on the GPU uses a CPU and GPU together in a heterogeneous computing model, with the "sequential" part of the application running on the CPU and the computationally-intensive part running on the hundreds of processing cores built into the GPU.
Application developers have to modify their application to take the compute-intensive kernels (core components of an operating system) and map them to the GPU. The rest of the application remains on the CPU.
At the Intel "Nehalem" server chip event on Monday, a panel of representatives from large companies addressed the issue of CPU versus GPU. Currently, these customers are using CPUs to do their data crunching.
Keith Gray, manager, high performance and technical computing at oil giant BP, spelled out why he has hesitated to use GPUs to date while expressing interest in adopting them in the future. "Our business is about accelerating our development of new seismic imaging research algorithms. At this point we actually believe the level of programming difficulty (and) lack of standardization of application development tools make the move to accelerated computing a bit risky," he said.
CPU (left) versus GPU
(Credit: Nvidia)Gray continued. "We are watching the evolution of the programming interfaces. Once those are better standardized, once the issues of moving data back and forth from the general purpose system to an accelerator is addressed, we'll be very interested in taking advantage of it," he said.
Lincoln Wallen, head of research and development at DreamWorks Animation, is also looking into exploiting power of the GPU for tasks such as rendering. "We're looking forward to exploit more flexible compute models, perhaps involve more of the graphics processing functionality but tightly coupled with very powerful CPUs to address the particular way in which we generate images, very soft body, lots of geometry generation," he said.
Wallen continued that, as he sees it, Larrabee offers an advantage because of its tight coupling between the CPU and GPU. "The promise of Larrabee with that tight coupling and the programming model offers a great opportunity to start to explore that type of architecture for our particular workloads," he said.
A Dell slide shown Tuesday was a reminder that a future 80-core processor is still in sight.
Flash back two years to the Intel Developer Forum when CEO Paul Otellini pledged to deliver an 80-core processor in five years.
Otellini said at the time that the chips will be capable of exchanging data at a terabyte a second and that the company hopes to have these chips ready for commercial production within a five-year window.
Michael Dell referred to a slide showing an 80-core chip Tuesday at SC08, a conference in Austin, Texas, focused on high-performance computing.
The trend of packing more compute power into small supercomputing enclosures "is really driven by what's going on in microprocessors. The x86 revolution continues. You see more and more cores. Increased performance. But also without more power required," he said, speaking during the keynote.
Dell slide shown Tuesday at SC08
(Credit: Dell Computer)In various venues, Intel has spelled out its intention to bring out many-core processors including its upcoming Larrabee graphics chip and future server processors that may reach 32 cores. Currently, Intel's Dunnington processor gets the prize (at Intel) for the most cores: six. Sun Microsystem's "Rock" processor will have 16 cores.
The 'Stallion' Visualization Cluster.
(Credit: Dell)Democratize IT. A banal catch phrase until you see off-the-shelf gaming boxes from PC maker Dell being used for visual supercomputing.
CEO Michael Dell showed the "Stallion" Visualization Cluster at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) running on standard Dell XPS gaming machines during his keynote Tuesday at SC08, a conference in Austin, Texas, focused on high-performance computing. (The keynote was streamed over the Web.)
The Stallion "visualization wall" uses XPS boxes to power 30-inch Dell displays. "The largest display of its kind in the world, at 307 million pixels," Michael Dell said.
"Literally these are gaming systems. We just leverage what was going on the commodity technology market," said Kelly Gaither, associate director at TACC, speaking as part of Dell's keynote address.
Dell is also looking to Nvidia to democratize supercomputing and bring it down to the desktop. "Advances in graphics technology are actually creating some new opportunities in supercomputing," Dell said. "We announced today that we're extending our partnership with Nvidia to advance their CUDA architecture in Dell's precision workstations," he said.
"So this really is the supercomputer on your desk. Adding one (Nvidia) Tesla card to Dell Precision workstations delivers a theoretical performance of 1 teraflop," he said. "That's seven times higher than (a high-end) Thinking Machines (supercomputer) back in 1993." (A teraflop is one trillion floating point operations per second.)
Dell also announced Tuesday that it has teamed up with Intel and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to build the Hyperion hyperscale computing environment at LLNL. The National Nuclear Security Administration's Advanced Simulation and Computing Program at the facility expects Hyperion to speed the development and reduce the cost of powerful high-performance computing clusters vital to U.S. Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Administration missions, including climate change, and other global challenges.
"Hyperion is a test bed that will share those breakthroughs with the entire open-source community," Dell said.
Dell Precision workstation becomes supercomputer with Nvidia Telsa technology
(Credit: Dell)But Dell's big message was how mass-market and standard commercial computing technologies have invaded the supercomputing space. "429 of the top 500 supercomputers are based on the x86 architecture," Dell said, referring to the computing architecture being used in laptops and desktops today. "What you see here is some of the things from the commercial world in managing large data centers really penetrating very heavily (into high-performance computing)."
"Three years ago, using our blade chassis, we put 240 cores in a full-size 42U rack with 2.8GHz CPUs, and that was 1.3 teraflops of theoretical peak performance per rack. Today, we get 512 cores in a 42U rack with 3.3GHz CPUs, and that's 6.82 teraflops per rack," Dell said. ("U" is a unit of measure that describes the height of equipment used in a rack computer. Typically, 1U equals 1.75 inches.)
More addressable memory space--critical for high performance computing--will come with Intel's Nehalem processor, he said. Nehalem will support memory spaces of up to 1 terabyte (trillion bytes) of system memory, Dell said. Most PCs today support 4 gigabytes (billions of bytes).
In related news, Nvidia announced that Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) will use Nvidia Tesla GPUs to boost the computational horsepower of Tokyo Tech's Tsubame supercomputer.
Through the addition of 170 Tesla S1070 1U systems, the supercomputer now delivers nearly 170 teraflops of theoretical peak performance, placing it among the world's Top 500 Supercomputers.
"Tokyo Tech is constantly investigating future computing platforms and it had become clear to us that to make the next major leap in performance, Tsubame had to adopt GPU computing technologies," said Satoshi Matsuoka, division director of the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center at Tokyo Tech in a statement.
Regular or ultra? Consumers will now have at least a couple of performance options when they order solid-state drives on the newest ultraportable notebooks from Dell.
Dell Latitude E4200
(Credit: Dell Computer)Hard disk drives are getting scarcer by the week in the ultraportable notebook market. Dell has officially started selling its new 2.2-pound Latitude E4200 this week with solid-state drives as the only storage option, accelerating a trend in ultraportables away from hard disk drives.
The popular ThinkPad X301 also comes with solid-state drive options only.
The SSD options on the E4200 come in two flavors, standard or "Ultra".
Dell pre-announced the high-performance Samsung Ultra SATA-II solid-state drive in February. The SSD is able to read data at 100 megabytes per second (MB/sec) and write it at 80MB/sec, 60 percent faster than SATA I drives, according to Samsung.
The new SSDs will "leave traditional notebook hard drives in the dust," Dell said when it announced the option. "Our labs benchmarked this drive in a Latitude notebook and saw a 35 percent overall system performance increase over a standard 2.5-inch 5400rpm notebook hard drive using SYSmark '07. That's even more impressive when you realize that the difference between standard 5400rpm and performance 7200rpm drives (in the same generation) is 10 percent on average," Dell said at that time.
Dell's Ultra drive has approximately 20 percent better read/write performance over more conventional SSDs, according to Avi Cohen, managing partner at Avian Securities. And Dell gets its SSDs from sources other than just Samsung, including STEC and Micron Technology, Cohen believes.
SSDs are generally much faster than hard disk drives at reading data (which is what computer users spend most of their time doing). SSDs are becoming popular in ultraportable notebooks because they have advantages crucial for small laptops: they weigh less, generally use less power, generate less heat, and withstand shock better.
Samsung chart comparing SSDs to HDDs. Samsung also makes hard disk drives.
(Credit: Samsung)The new SATA II SSD can resist up to 1,500 Gs of shock in a half millisecond compared with a shock resistance rating of 300 Gs in 2 milliseconds for a typical HDD, Samsung said.
Intel is getting into the SSD performance grade act too. The chipmaker offers Extreme SSDs and mainstream SSDs.
Extreme SSDs offer faster write speeds of up to 170 MB/s, while mainstream drives are rated at up to 70 MB/s, according to Intel.
The 80GB and 160GB Intel SSDs for the mainstream notebook market are based on multilevel cell (MLC) technology, while the Extreme 32GB and 64GB for the enterprise market are based on single-level cell (SLC). In 2009, Intel expects to have MLC drives with capacities up to 320GB.
MLC allows drive makers to build higher-capacity drives at lower cost but is neither as fast as SLC nor as inherently reliable.
Dell will sell you a 128GB solid state drive for an unprecedented $649. But wait. An IDC report claims the performance gap between solid state drives and lower-cost high-performance hard disk drives is not that significant at the system level.
Solid state drive offered by Dell
(Credit: Dell Computer)Solid state drives are attracting more scrutiny as they increase in capacity and decrease in price. (Dell's $649 drive is a radical price drop since many drives with half the capacity still sell for more than $700.)
Solid state drives (SSDs) are considered to be generally more power efficient, faster, and in some respects more reliable than hard disk drives.
IDC tested 2.5-inch 7200 rpm desktop drives against SSDs and found that previous tests comparing SSDs and hard disk drives may be misleading, according to SearchStorage.com, which cited the IDC report.
"Many tests have been done comparing 4200 rpm hard drives to SSDs," said IDC analyst David Reinsel. "But 5400 rpm is now mainstream and even 7200 rpm disks are available." The IDC report says the performance gap between computers with 7200 rpm 2.5-inch drives and those with SSDs was smaller than expected because the performance of the entire system must be taken into account.
(It should be noted that 4200 rpm hard disk drives are sometimes used in comparative testing because 4200 rpm drives are offered along with SSDs in laptops such as the MacBook Air and Hewlett-Packard 2510p.)
IDC's Reinsel also said that system redesigns will be necessary in both PCs and enterprise storage systems to reap the full benefits of SSDs. One of the challenges is that SSDs generally write data more slowly than they read data.
In related news, The Tech Report also did benchmarking of SSDs and 2.5-inch hard disk drives rated at 5400 and 7200 rpm. Generally, the SSDs were faster (in some cases much faster) but not in every benchmark and not by that much in some benchmarks.
SSDs have received a lot more attention since companies like Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and Toshiba have adopted them as alternatives to hard disk drives in laptops. Lesser known is that SSDs are also being deployed by large corporations in server-related applications. Companies like Citibank and American Express peg server performance on IOPS or input/output operations per second where SSDs beat hard disk drives handily.
The IDC report follows other reviews that claim solid state drives (SSDs) are not as power efficient as manufacturers claim--though the power-efficiency testing methodology used by some review sites has been disputed by manufacturers.
IDC abstract here.
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