Intel Equipped to Lead Industry to Era of Exascale Computing

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Intel Corporation vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group, outlined the company’s vision to achieve ExaFLOP/s performance by the end of this decade. An ExaFLOP/s is quintillion computer operations per second, hundreds times more than today’s fastest supercomputers.

Reaching exascale levels of performance in the future will not only require the combined efforts of industry and governments, but also approaches being pioneered by the Intel® Many Integrated Core (Intel® MIC1) Architecture, according to Skaugen. Managing the explosive growth in the amount of data shared across the Internet, finding solutions to climate change, managing the growing costs of accessing resources such as oil and gas, and a multitude of other challenges require increased amounts of computing resources that only increasingly high-performing supercomputers can address.
 
The current fastest supercomputer in the world is a Fujitsu built model (K Computer) in Japan capable of > 8 petaflops. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_computer

The current system uses 68,544 8-core SPARC64 VIIIfx processors packed in 672 cabinets, for a total of 548,352 cores, manufactured by Fujitsu with 45nm CMOS process technology.

If SPARC64 (each VIIIfx core rated at 16 gflops) scaled following Moore's Law, a system similar to the one described above with newer processors would reach exa-scale by the year 2021-2022. Intel's claim of 2018 isn't too surprising in that light, especially when using what are essentially GPU based clusters.

In the Intel exa scale slides, it hints that power consumption will be a big part of its strategy, along with familiar x86 programming that the compute cores use. One system mentioned was a 4U server that provides 7.4 tflops in SGEMM (config on slide 30 shows: 8 x Knights Ferry development boards @1.2GHz, 2GB [email protected]/s, "Intel Alpha level software"). At 10 of those per cabinet, it would take 110 cabinets to match the K Computer using Knights Ferry. /nerd
 
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