Accelerator Adoption Picks Up Speed
Well, we're six months deep into 2010, and while there hasn't been a lot of blockbuster stories on the HPC front, the trends are unmistakable: more GPU computing, multicore multiplication in CPUs, and the search for a software model that ties everything together.
In fact, the biggest "story" of the year from a vendor had elements of all three of these trends. That was Intel's revelation of the upcoming "Many Integrated Cores" (MIC) HPC coprocessor, based on recycling the company's Larrabee technology. In a nutshell, the idea behind MIC is to build a manycore x86 chip with lots of vector horsepower for HPC-type codes. The original notion of using Larrabee as the basis for high-end graphics chips was jettisoned in December 2009.
The rationale behind MIC is to be able to preserve the industry's investment in x86 software in order to provide a smooth path to manycore technical computing. To help ease that transition, Intel will supply its own MIC compiler, parallel computing development tools and software libraries to support the new architecture.
Commercial offerings of this technology aren't scheduled to show up until late 2011, or more likely 2012, but early versions of MIC (just the Larrabee hardware, really) are already in the hands of selected customers. The first product will be built on the 22nm transistor geometries and is codenamed "Knights Corner."
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