The new age of
David Yipp, of OFC, provides a timely update on
the HPC processor market I
BM’s POWER8 systems seem to be gaining some traction, especially with interest in the new Minsky platform, specifically the NVlink performance and
integration into the system. Accelerator-based computation is
progressively seen as a way of increasing HPC performance for a wider variety of jobs, e.g. CFD, deep learning, AI, life sciences etc. Previously, the range of jobs was limited, but now it seems to be opening up, as research and experience in these ‘new’ technologies matures.
So is this the dawning of a new age? Te daddy of the accelerators is clearly the GPU. Nvidia did a great job of creating an ecosystem for development and its marketing campaign has been relentless (sorry, I don’t discount AMD; however, the adoption of CUDA over OpenCL has been a factor). Te Xeon Phi, the other mainstream accelerator coming from Intel, is arguably less successful in adoption. However, that might be changing. Intel’s Knights Landing (KNL), Intel’s
latest generation of Xeon Phi, is slowly but surely rolling out now, moving to a self-hosting system initially and becoming available in a more familiar add-in card form factor later. Similar to Nvidia, there is a flavour of the chip, the ‘F’ variant, that includes the interconnect on die, similar but more integrated into the system. Arguably, the Intel Scalable System framework of which KNL and Omni-path are parts of the same jigsaw, offers a more complete solution than the Nvidia offering. Tis is always going to be a David and Goliath story – an Nvidia, OpenPOWER
28 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD @scwmagazine l
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Foundation et al and Intel story. Tere are always going to be pros and cons for each camp. Nvidia has done a great job of supporting CUDA over the last decade. Yes you read that correctly; CUDA has been around for nearly 10 years! Tey have created an ecosystem of support, research and development that they should be proud of; the teaching centres, research institutions and GPU centres, building on the base of GeForce gaming cards. Every gamer on the planet who has an
Nvidia graphics card has access to HPC resources that, 20 years ago, could only be
Aquarius
fulfilled by field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Intel, on the other hand, has an ecosystem that practically all mainstream programmers have used – Intel compiler tools. Intel has been intelligent enough to reuse this vast array of experience and building upon the x86 legacy in KNL, programmers already familiar with (specifically) HPC have less of a ‘journey’ in programming for the KNL system. Intel can bridge the gap, by providing the
complete ecosystem for HPC – this is what they are doing; however, they need to do more in developing the momentum behind
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