SC12 report
Jim Hearnden, IEEE member and enterprise technologist at Dell
Everyone in the industry is agreed that exascale computing – 1018
floating point
calculations per second and therefore about hundred times faster than Titan – cannot be achieved by ‘more of the same’ (i.e. a simple extrapolation of current technology) but will require investment in new and possibly unorthodox technologies both at the hardware and soſtware levels. Nervousness about the commitment of the
US Government and the Congress to this sort of long-term investment in technology could be seen at the official SC12 press conference, where Dona Crawford, associate director, Computation, at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, announced that the US Council on Competitiveness is to be funded to the tune of nearly one million dollars over the next three years to develop recommendations to Congress on extreme computing. Why should this be necessary, journalists at the press conference asked, when the Department of Energy had already sent to Congress, in February, its plan to build an exascale machine before the end of the decade. In addition, it was announced that the
consultancy company IDC is to be funded to create an economic model estimating the return on investment (ROI) from high- performance computing. Since no one in the history of science and technology studies has successfully predicted ROI in advance (it’s easier to do in hindsight), one could be forgiven for thinking that these are signs of worry that the constituency favouring exascale is unravelling and thus both ‘studies’ are a disguised form of advocacy that needs to be put in place to shore up support for the exascale project in the USA. To add to the nervousness among US
proponents of supercomputing, the European computer industry appears to be getting its act together and to be working hand-in- glove with Government (in the form of the European Commission). Te Europeans staged a conference session to outline the ‘European Technology Platform for High Performance Computing’ (ETP4HPC). Tis is a project specifically to boost the European ‘HPC value chain’, according to Jean-Francois Lavingnon, director of HPC for French manufacturer Bull. Te point is to create an industry-led framework that will define Europe’s research priorities and action plans, in particular delivering a Strategic Research Agenda by the end of this year, that will form part of the European Union’s ‘Horizon 2020’ research programme. Although Europe’s HPC suppliers have only about 4.3 per cent of the world market, there is a recognition in both the public and private sector in Europe, according to Giampietro Tecchiolli CTO of Eurotech, that ‘HPC represents a strategic tool in the development of other technologies.’
20 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD
Titan, a Cray XK7 system installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, heads the Top500 list as the world’s most powerful supercomputer
Te processor technology underpinning
HPC is also getting interesting – and political in its own way. Although some large manufacturers, notably IBM and Fujitsu, still make special processors, much of the industry has standardised for many years on x86 commodity chips from Intel or AMD. A few years back, Nvidia transformed the scene with its GPU accelerators and the signs are that the technology is going to become even more complicated as several new companies, such as ARM and Texas Instruments, enter the fray.
HPC REPRESENTS A
STRATEGIC TOOL IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF OTHER TECHNOLOGIES
Although the ARM processor is currently
available only in a 32-bit configuration, there is a roadmap through a 40-bit processor to 64 bits in the future. In mid-October, Penguin Computing announced its Ultimate Data X1 (UDX1) system, the first server platform offered by a North American system vendor that is built on the ARM-based EnergyCore System on a Chip (SoC) from Calxeda. And although HP had launched the first phase of its Project Moonshot programme to develop extremely low-energy servers using Intel’s Atom processors in the summer, at SC12, it had examples of blades incorporating incorporating Calxeda’s realisation of ARM processors. Calxeda, based in Austin Texas, is in the vanguard of low-energy high performance systems using ARM. ARM’s profile was further enhanced when, on the first day of the exhibition, the Mont-Blanc
European project announced that it had selected the Samsung Exynos platform for its prototype low-power high-performance computer. Te Samsung Exynos 5 Dual features a dual-core 1.7GHz mobile CPU built on ARM Cortex-A15 architecture plus an integrated ARM Mali-T604 GPU for increased performance and energy efficiency. Tis is claimed to be the first use of an embedded mobile SoC in HPC. It will enable the Mont-Blanc project to explore the benefits of deeply integrated, energy-efficient processors and GPU accelerators, compared to traditional homogeneous multicore systems, and heterogeneous CPU + external GPU architectures. Ironically, this pioneering step into a new world of HPC was invisible to anyone passing by the Samsung stand at SC12, which concentrated largely on memory systems. Te rise of embedded and mobile chip
makers was exemplified further by Texas Instruments (TI), at SC for a second year, who demonstrated systems that balance multiple ARM Cortex-A15 MPCore processors and its own digital signal processors (DSPs) on the same chip. According to Arnon Friedman, business manager, Multicore DSP, for TI: ‘Te message we are trying to get out is that it’s a full processor, not just an accelerator. We’re running high-performance Linpack on DSPs.’ It’s potentially a better way to cloud computing, he said, and ‘one of the ways we can do heterogeneous architectures.’ According to TI, the cloud’s first-generation general-purpose servers sometimes struggle with big data applications. Based on TI’s KeyStone architecture, the processors, with the integration of security processing, networking and switching, reduce system cost and power consumption in workloads such as HPC, video delivery, and media and image processing.
www.scientific-computing.com
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