HPC 2015-16 | Processors
Nvidia, with a specific mission to expand the ecosystem of developers writing applications and soſtware for the Power architecture. Te OpenPOWER Foundation itself
was founded in 2013 as an open technical membership organisation. Te intention is to open the Power architecture to give the industry the ability to innovate across the full hardware and soſtware stack; to simplify system design and to drive an expansion of enterprise-class hardware and soſtware stack. A third factor, not directly related to HPC
as narrowly defined, is that IBM is aiming the Power system at a much wider range of users than HPC by itself. It aims to include commercial and enterprise data centres and hyperscale users (the search engines and social media providers, for example) among the users of the technology. So there will be a wider user base.
Intel and ARM One significant driver for change in the current HPC market is energy consumption – an area where it is hard to compete with Intel. Te economics of Intel’s advantage are largely due to the sheer volume of its processors installed in desktops, servers, and clusters across the world. While the technology may not have been
created for HPC – early x86 processors did not even have a floating point unit – over the
“We are starting to plateau as an industry, on how quickly we
can build performance with the old techniques”
years, many features have been introduced to make these processors more suited to the needs of the HPC market. Tat, together with the low price driven by high volume, has given Intel a seemingly insurmountable lead in the CPU market, which is mirrored in the HPC sector. Any new architectural advances or new technologies will have to generate a skilled user base with coding skills that can effectively scale soſtware – something that has been built up around x86 CPUs over the past 20 years. However, if this race was driven purely
by the economics of high volume sales, then it may be ARM – which is known primarily for processors in mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones – that begins to pull ahead, as these markets are starting to dwarf
16 Intel Xeon E5-2600 V3 CPU internal processor die
the other areas of consumer computing markets. ARM has made admirable progress in the HPC. It develops the architecture and instruction set, and then leases the chip designs and the ARM instruction set to third parties, who develop the products. ARM produces very energy-efficient
processors that deliver excellent power/ performance. As the HPC market moves towards the Exascale era, it will need to make significant energy savings compared to today’s technology. Te European Mont- Blanc project is one attempt to build an Exascale HPC architecture based around the ARM processors, largely because of their energy consumption. Te project was granted an additional €8 million to continue its research until 2016.
FPGAs Te need for energy-efficiency and the drive towards data-intensive compute operations has encouraged people to look even further outside the traditional HPC environment to find a solution to increasing power needs. FPGAs and DSPs offer tremendous potential for high-performance computing accelerators as they can operate within a much lower power budget than a typical GPU. Te cost, however, is complexity of the programming. FPGA manufacturer Altera has been
promoting the use of OpenCL to generate host code as well as FPGA kernel code. Te process could make FPGAs more easily accessible to the general-purpose HPC
market, although there is still a lot of work to be done in this area. In order to provide more functionality for HPC users, Altera is also developing floating-point arithmetic engines and DSP blocks that can be included in an FPGA-based processor design. FPGAs took a step closer to the
mainstream of high-performance computing when FPGA manufacturers began to introduce specific tools for developing C and C++ codes. Altera and Xilinx, two of the largest FPGA manufacturers, opted to do this through the use of OpenCL. Mike Strickland, director of the computer and storage business unit at Altera said: ‘Te problem was that we did not have the ease of use; we did not have soſtware friendly interface back in 2008. Te huge enabler here has been OpenCL.’ Te recent acquisition of Altera by
Intel has generated further interest in FPGA technology but Addison Snell, Chief Executive Officer, and CEO of Intersect360 Research, believes this acquisition is more focused on the hyperscale computing market rather than on Intel trying to position FPGAs for HPC. Snell said: ‘We watched it [the hyperscale computing market] grow and mature to the point that we have now taken that out of our high-performance computing methodology and really established it as a separate hyperscale market. It has grown and matured to the point that it has its own market dynamics that behave differently from other enterprise, but also other high performance or scale-sensitive applications.’
Intel
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