SC12 report At SC12 both Intel and Nvidia made
high-profile announcements about the availability of the Phi coprocessor and the Tesla K20 respectively. In a mirror image of the US Government’s decision to withdraw, Intel provided a highly visible symbol of its commitment to HPC by expanding its presence to create a massive stand on the show floor, taking over space that had previously been allocated to US national laboratories before the cancellation. Intel’s Diane Bryant, general manager of the company’s Data Center and Connected Systems Group, was at pains to stress that the Phi is not an accelerator but is a coprocessor. It has the same architecture as the mainstream Xeon family and therefore there is no need to develop a new programming model to make use of the Phi’s capabilities. Although the name ‘Nvidia’ was never uttered during any of Intel’s press briefings about the Phi, this represents Intel’s rejoinder to the inroads that the Nvidia GPUs have made in HPC. Nvidia has developed Cuda, its own parallel programming model for GPUs. But although Intel and Nvidia have locked
Chad Harrington, VP of marketing at Adaptive Computing
the SANAM system from the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology came second in the Green500 listings for energy efficiency. SANAM has an Intel CPU system that uses AMD’s new FirePro S10000 GPU accelerators. AMD decided to time the promotion of its FirePro Workstation Graphics at SC12. It had announced in October that it will design 64-bit ARM processors in addition to its x86 processors to create a highly-integrated, 64-bit multicore System-on-a-Chip (SoC) for cloud and data
BOUNDARIES ARE BLURRING BETWEEN MOBILE CHIPSETS AND HPC PROCESSORS
centre servers. Te first ARM-based AMD Opteron processor is targeted for production in 2014 and will integrate the AMD SeaMicro Freedom. Rumours have been circulating for some
antlers, the system vendors, appear to be agnostic and, in the course of SC12, many of them duly announced support for both the Phi and the Tesla K20. Among those releasing press announcements of support for both technologies at SC12 were SGI, HP, Penguin and Silicon Mechanics. Somewhat ahead of the pack, Cray had announced in June that its next generation Cascade supercomputer, the XC30, would be available with the Intel Phi coprocessors, and duly followed that in August with a similar announcement regarding the Nvidia Kepler GPU. Brian Payne, director of marketing for Dell’s Power Edge Servers, appeared at the Intel press conference to endorse the Phi coprocessor. AMD, somehow, could not quite shake off
the impression that it is falling behind, despite the fact that the Titan machine, the fastest in the world, uses its Opteron processors. Moreover,
Further information
AMD
www.amd.com
ARM
www.arm.com
Calexda
www.calxeda.com
Cray Inc
www.cray.com
European Technology Platform for High Performance Computing
www.etp4hpc.eu
Intel Phi
www.intel.com
Nvidia
www.nvidia.co.uk/object/ tesla-high-performance- computing-uk
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Titan)
www.olcf.ornl.gov/titan
Penguin Computing
www.penguincomputing.com
Samsung
www.samsung.com/exynos
Texas Instruments
www.ti.com
22 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD
The Mathworks
www.mathworks.com
Top500
www.top500.org
US Council on Competitiveness
www.compete.org
US Department of Energy
science.energy.gov/ascr
US Department of Defense
www.hpcmo.hpc.mil/cms2
time that AMD might be a candidate for merger or acquisition (
http://www.top500.org/blog/ about-assumptions-and-acquisitions/ ) and the company’s future was a subject of speculation on the show floor, even by companies that use AMD components. In a sign of how the times have shiſted in favour of mobile platforms – phones, tablets etc. – Qualcomm, the San-Diego based global ‘fabless’ semiconductor company that specialises in mobile and wireless chipsets, has been mentioned as a potential acquirer. Just as the boundaries are blurring between
mobile chipsets and the main processors for HPC systems, so the definition of a supercomputer is also changing. Although the Top500 list is still definitive and is eagerly examined to see who is in the Top 10 and who has fallen out, much of the emphasis at SC12 was on moving data around, rather than on fast numerical calculations. ARM processors may
not yet have 64-bit capability, but they do have a significant role to play in data processing. Te divide between the number crunchers and the data processors is most evident in the way in which companies want to access cloud computing. For many organisations, their own internal compute resources will sometimes not be enough. But to burst out into the cloud for low-latency number crunching, means that users want to access ‘bare metal’ cloud and not virtual machines as are offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). On the other hand, those whose compute
tasks require high throughput but where low latency is less of an issue may be perfectly happy to burst out into a virtual machine. Tus many companies on the show floor were advertising ‘bare metal’ while others were happy to offer soſtware that configured jobs for running on virtual machines such as AWS. Arend Dittmer, director of Product Marketing for Penguin Computing, remarked in an interview that while there had initially been a low uptake of the company’s on-demand offering, ‘the train has now leſt the station and a lot more companies will leverage the benefits of the cloud.’ He pointed out that Hadoop applications use lots of I/O and flop rate was less important. Penguin itself offered ‘bare metal’ cloud services to its customers. Te big question, he concluded, was what is the pricing model of the independent soſtware vendors (ISVs), for that would determine how fast organisations were able to take up cloud computing. Cloud computing, and the appropriate pricing
model, is exercising the minds of ISVs, according to Silvina Grad-Freilich of Te MathWorks. Te company is one of very few ISVs who attend SC and who take a booth on the exhibition floor. It is important to Te MathWorks, however, she said because it allows the company to keep its finger on the pulse of new developments in the industry and to hear customers’ views. Before Cloud computing, people used to delay purchasing soſtware until they had the hardware, she commented. But oſten they did not know how much hardware they would need to run particular jobs. Tis translated to frustration for the end user scientist or engineer – and loss of revenue for Te MathWorks. But the Cloud is solving that, she said, and the company had been successful in developing pricing models that allowed users to go into the cloud if they needed to. Aſter all, she concluded: ‘What is important to us is to provide access to our soſtware.’ It was an unconscious echo of the
fundamental point made by Jeff Hollingsworth, the Chair of SC12: ‘HPC exists for the applications. We can build rooms full of blinking lights, but that’s not what it is about. It’s not about the latest in silicon, but about getting the science done.’
www.scientific-computing.com
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