The
High Performance Computing market is a small but profitable one.
Corporations and research institutions are willing to pay a premium
if their research and modeling can be sped up using new technologies.
One
of the more recent innovations has been the use of General-Purpose
computation on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU). By using stream
processing to harness the incredible parallelism of GPUs,
researchers have been able to perform computations faster and cheaper
than just using CPUs.
Intel's Larrabee program sought
to combine massive parallelism with the programming flexibility of
the x86 architecture. Although development of consumer Larrabee
graphics cards are on
hold, the development of Larrabee
technology for the HPC market is ongoing.
Intel
plans to launch its first product using this technology as early as
the end of 2011. Codenamed Knights
Corner,
the new chip will use Intel's P1270
22nm process and could scale to more than 50 cores. Knight's
Corner will
utilize a new Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture, and Intel is
expected to develop a product line of MIC-based products that will
share common tools, software algorithms, and programming techniques.
The
company cites its history of many-core related research programs such
as the Larrabee
program and Single-chip
Cloud Computer as making MIC and Knight's
Corner possible.
Industry design and development kits codenamed Knight's
Ferry
are
already shipping to select developers targeting
high-performance computing segments such as exploration, scientific
research, and financial or climate simulation.
"Intel's
Xeon processors, and now our new Intel Many Integrated Core
architecture products, will further push the boundaries of science
and discovery as Intel accelerates solutions to some of humanity's
most challenging problems," said Kirk Skaugen, Vice President
and General Manager of Intel's Data Center Group.
"The
Intel MIC architecture will extend Intel's leading HPC products and
solutions that are already in nearly 82 percent of the world's top
supercomputers. Today's investments are indicative of Intel's growing
commitment to the global HPC community."
