Intel Reveals Details of Next-Generation High-Performance Computing Platforms
At SC11, Intel Corporation revealed details about the company’s next-generation Intel Xeon processor-based and Intel® Many Integrated Core (Intel® MIC)-based platforms designed for high-performance computing (HPC). The company also outlined new investments in research and development that will lead the industry to Exascale performance by 2018.
During his briefing at the conference, Rajeeb Hazra, general manager of Technical Computing, Intel Datacenter and Connected Systems Group, said that the Intel Xeon processor E5 family is the world’s first server processor to support full integration of the PCI Express 3.0 specification**. PCIe 3.0 is estimated** to double the interconnect bandwidth over the PCIe* 2.0 specification** while enabling lower power and higher density server implementations. New fabric controllers taking advantage of the PCI Express 3.0 specification will allow more efficient scaling of performance and data transfer with the growing number of nodes in HPC supercomputers.
The early-performance benchmarks revealed that the Intel Xeon E5 delivers up to 2.1* times** more performance in raw FLOPS (Floating Point Operations Per Second as measured by Linpack*) and up to 70 percent more performance using real-HPC workloads compared to the previous generation of Intel Xeon 5600 series processors.
“Customer acceptance of the Intel Xeon E5 processor has exceeded our expectations and is driving the fastest debut on the TOP500 list of any processor in Intel’s history,” said Hazra. “Collecting, analyzing and sharing large amounts of information is critical to today’s science activities and requires new levels of processor performance and technologies designed precisely for this purpose.”
The Intel Xeon E5 processors made their way onto the TOP500 list in the year of the 40th anniversary of availability of the world’s first microprocessor (the Intel 4004 processor) and on the 10th anniversary of the launch of the Intel Xeon brand. Since the introduction of Intel Xeon processors in 2001, Intel estimates that Xeon processor performance has increased by more than 130 times***.
Two months since its initial shipments to supercomputer centers, Intel Xeon E5 processors now power 10 systems on the TOP500 list. More than 20,000 of these processors are in operation, delivering a cumulative peak performance of more than 3.4 Petaflops.
As previously announced, the upcoming Intel Xeon processor E5 family will power several other future supercomputers, including the 10 PFLOPS “Stampede” at Texas Advanced Computing Center, the 1.6 PFLOPs “Yellowstone” at The National Center for Atmospheric Research, the 1.6 PFLOPS “Curie” at GENCI, the 1.3 PFLOPS system at International Fusion Energy Research Center (IFERC) and more than 1 PFLOPS “Pleiades” expansion at NASA.
Intel started shipping the Intel Xeon processor E5 family to a small number of cloud and HPC customers in September, with broad availability planned in the first half of 2012. Intel is tracking more than 400 design wins for the Intel Xeon processor E5 family, nearly double the amount at time of launch of the Xeon 5500/5600 generation. Demand for initial production units is approximately 20 times greater than for previous generations of the Intel Xeon 5500 or 5600 series processors.
During SC’11 Intel also provided details on its greatly expanded lineup of server boards and chassis, including products specifically optimized for HPC, which will be ready to support the launch of the Intel® Xeon® Processor E5.
First Teraflops Intel Many Integrated Core Co-Processor Showcased