Intel Architecture Driving Future of Supercomputing - Printer Friendly version without Comments

Appeared on: Monday, November 16, 2009
Intel Architecture Driving Future of Supercomputing

More than four out of every five supercomputers on the TOP500 list are powered by Intel processors.

Intel today announced new technologies that will better equip scientists, researchers and engineers with the computing power to speed up science and engineering projects such as the development of new drugs and climate change research.
In the first half of 2010 Intel Corporation will launch a new High Performance Computing (HPC) optimized version of its forthcoming processor codenamed "Nehalem-EX." The 6-core chip will run at higher frequencies than 8-core versions of the Nehalem-EX processors and will offer advantages on some HPC workloads. The systems will offer greater memory bandwidth and capacity compared to today's solutions, allowing the production of supercomputers with up to 256 such chips.
Intel also announced that a beta program for Intel's Ct technology will be available by the end of 2009. Intel Ct technology makes parallel programming in the C and C++ languages easier by automatically parallelizing code across multi-core and many-core processors.
The 34th edition of the TOP500 list shows that 402 of the world's top 500 systems have Intel processors inside, with increased adoption in computers designed for geophysics, financial calculations and scientific research. According to the list, Intel chips power 20 of the top 50 systems. Systems using Intel Xeon quad-core processors lead the list, holding 379 spots.
The Intel Xeon 5500 series processor, previously codenamed "Nehalem-EP," is already significantly impacting the HPC community, powering 21 systems in the top 100.
NASA and SGI have added servers containing 2,304 energy-efficient Xeon 5500 series processors increasing the "brainpower" of the Pleiades supercomputer by 35 percent to handle NASA's commitment to advance global climate change research. Pleiades now boasts a total of 14,080 Intel Xeon processors.
At No. 10 on the list is the Sandia National Laboratories and Sun Microsystems supercomputer called "Red Sky." Red Sky features more than 10,000 Intel Xeon 5500 series processors.
The semi-annual TOP500 list of supercomputers is the work of Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of the U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee. The complete report is available at www.top500.org.