HPC 2014-15 | Processors


Power and the processor


John Barr surveys the technologies that will underpin the next generation of HPC processors and finds that software, not hardware, holds the key


Over the years many proprietary processors, notably Cray’s vector processors, have been designed to deliver the compute power in HPC systems. Tis started to change in the 1990s. At the


SuperComputing conference in Reno in 1989, Eugene Brooks of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory talked about swarms of ‘killer micros’ replacing these expensive, but powerful HPC processors. Since then we have seen a slow but inexorable transition away from specialist proprietary processors to clusters of commodity systems using mainstream technologies. Te first TOP500 list (www.top500.org) was


published in June 1993, and was dominated by processors from the likes of Cray, Fujitsu, NEC and Convex. Even Intel’s presence on the list was down to the i860, and not the x86 family. Just five years later the transition towards mainstream processors was well under way, with more than half of the systems on the TOP500 list now using Sun’s SPARC, SGI’s MIPS, DEC’s Alpha and IBM’s POWER processors – and there was a single system using Intel’s Pentium Pro. Aſter a further five years the overall picture


was similar, but the main players were Intel with the x86, HP’s PA-RISC and IBM’s POWER processors. But vector processors had not gone away, and the DEC Alpha and SGI MIPS still featured. By June 2008 a significant change had taken place in the world of HPC processors, with the list now dominated by the x86 family of processors from both Intel and AMD – these processors powered more than 80 per cent of the systems on the list. In the most recent TOP500 list, published in June 2014 at the ISC conference in Leipzig, Intel powers 427 systems, AMD drives another 31 with their flavour of the x86 architecture, while only 42 systems use alternative


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Intel


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