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high-performance computing


traditional PCIe. OK, not quite the 115 GB/s between the POWER8 socket and the DDR4 memory, but getting there (who knows what NVlink 2.0 will be?) Tis performance allows faster


communication between the GPU and CPU, increasing the ability of the GPU to work on more data and push the results back to CPU. We have already seen the memory bandwidth performance of the POWER8 system lead to better performance for memory intensive applications over x86; the


the technology – developers need to be wooed away from Nvidia and mainstream applications need to be ported to take advantage. I haven’t forgotten to mention FPGAs – if


GPUs are the daddy of accelerators, FPGAs are the granddaddy of them all. Intel’s acquisition of Altera will put the cat among the pigeons as, arguably, they are as powerful as GPUs and consume less power than GPUs – but the catch here is the development


environment. Tey have long been seen as different to programme, but can Intel bring its development platform skills to this arena? One of the main drawbacks of any


accelerator application is the bottleneck of actually getting the application data onto the GPU/Phi/etc. NVlink goes some way to solve this problem. Traditionally, data has to come over the PCIe bus to the accelerator, at 32 GB/s, NVlink provides 80 GB/s more between the GPU and CPU than the


THIS IS ALWAYS GOING TO BE A DAVID AND GOLIATH STORY


addition of NVlink can only lead to further performance gains over a comparable x86 system. Coherent Accelerator Processor


Interface (CAPI), also part of the Power platform, allows accelerators to connect to the memory subsystems and underlying architecture of the POWER8 system, much like NVlink. CAPI has been extensively used for FPGA integration into the Power platform. Intel’s approach of putting the Omni path


connector on to the KNL die seems to be the logical and, in a way, a similar approach to the NVlink but on a more expansive scale – as you will be able to extend the reach further with the use of Omnipath Switches. With such disparate technologies aiming


at the same goal, it only breeds competition, so, is the dominance of Intel at an end? One can never discount ARM in the


dawning of a new age. Te train seems to have slowed slightly, but with the Japanese building a Post-K supercomputer based on ARM (I like to call ‘Super K J’), it will be stepping up again. Many manufacturers are talking about ARM, especially since the introduction of 64-bit support. Will it be a matter of time before someone introduces an NVlink ARM system? Together with IBM’s POWER8 systems,


there are a whole host of systems that are gaining in popularity. With the increased popularity of accelerator based computation and adoption of NVlink, and OmniPath, the future is certainly looking bright for HPC performance. It will be fascinating to watch the progression of ARM in the market over the next few months, and the titanic battle of Intel and NVIDIA/OpenPOWER et al.l


David Yipp is the HPC and storage business development manager at OCF


www.scientific-computing.com l @scwmagazine DECEMBER 2016/JANUARY 2017 29


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