Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor for HPC Due This Year

Intel disclosed new technical details of the first commercially available product from its Intel Xeon Phi product family, a coprocessor codenamed "Knights Corner."

Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor's ease of use is bolstered by the benefits of familiar programming models, techniques and developer tools available with Intel architecture. With greater use of parallel CPU code, software companies and IT departments do not have to retrain developers on proprietary programming models associated with accelerators.

In addition to its compatibility with x86 programming models, the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor will be visible to applications as an HPC-optimized, highly-parallel, separate compute node that runs its own Linux-based operating system independent of the host OS. This feature allows more flexibility when implementing cluster solutions that are not available with alternative graphics accelerator-based technologies.

Made with Intel's innovative 22nm, 3-D tri-gate transistors, the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor, available in a PCIe form factor, contains more than 50 cores and a minimum of 8GB of GDDR5 memory. It also features 512b wide SIMD support that improves performance by enabling multiple data elements to be processed with a single instruction.

Last year Intel showed a live demonstration of the single Knights Corner coprocessor delivering over 1 TeraFLOPs (1 trillion floating point operations per second) of double precision real life performance, as measured by DGEMM. At ISC'12 Intel demonstrated the same effective performance of more than 1 TeraFLOPs per node but measured by the industry standard benchmark Linpack (Rmax). By comparison, in 1997, it took more than 9000 Intel Pentium processors inside the ASCII RED* supercomputer to break the 1 TeraFLOPs barrier.

While initial production product shipments are planned for the second half of 2012, Intel has announced that the first Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor-based development cluster is up and running and ranked 150^th on the Top500 list, delivering 118 TFLOPs of performance. The Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor has strong industry support, with 44 manufacturers including Bull, Cray, Dell, HP, IBM, Inspur, SGI and NEC committed to including it in their system roadmaps.

"We are very excited to announce that our next-generation supercomputer code-named 'Cascade' will be available with the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, giving Cray customers the ability to push the limits of research and discovery," said Peg Williams, Cray's senior vice president of high performance computing systems. "Our Cascade system will feature some of the most advanced and highly innovative HPC technologies ever put into a Cray supercomputer. Combining these features with industry-leading Intel Xeon processors and the new Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors will result in a very compelling system for HPC centers around the world."

Doug Crowthers is a contributing editor and freelance writer for feature articles and news at Tom's Hardware.

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