Last week we talked about the upcoming release of Intel’s Xeon E5 processor family. This week, we have some even more important announcements regarding Intel MIC and the strategic direction that Intel is headed regarding high performance computing.
Die shot of 'Aubrey Isle,' the silicon chip included in the Intel MIC 'Knights Ferry' development platform
Anticipation is building over the upcoming release of Intel’s new Xeon processor E5 family. Formally announced last November in 2011, Intel unveiled some impressive stats for the new E5 line: full integration support for the PCI Express 3.0 base (which is estimated to double interconnect bandwidth over the PCIe 2.0 specification), over twice the performance in raw floating point operations per second (FLOPS), and substantially greater real-HPC workloads compared to the Xeon 5600 series.
In the original Intel press release, the company announced that:
As we near the end of 2011, we take a moment to reflect on the past year. It’s been a busy year for IT across virtually all verticals, from mobile and search to enterprise servers and cloud computing. When we attended HPC360 a few weeks ago, we had the pleasure to attend a keynote presentation by Addison Snell, CEO of Intersect Research in which he discussed the most important trends in high performance computing (HPC).
HPC is an exciting and growing industry that ICC has been moving into the past couple years. The traditional HPC space revolved around high-end research facilities particularly in science and engineering. However, with each year technological innovations and tailored systems such as our Supermicro GPU Simcluster have brought the realm of HPC closer to reality for many small/medium-sized business and organizations.
In this 2-part series we will look at the top 10 future trends in HPC from Intersect360′s research, coupled with our own analysis and thoughts. No better way for us computer nerds to close the year right? Let’s get started.
The AMD Opteron 6000 series continues marching forward with each new innovation building upon the capabilities and possibilities of the past. With the latest AMD Opteron 6200 processors now on the shelves, there is great hidden value to uncover. The highlight and the hype of the Opteron 6200 series has been mostly centered around the 16-core Interlagos, but there are some significant advantages in the 12-core options.
Let me illustrate.
We hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! We were certainly thankful to have a couple days of relaxation. November has been a big month for us. Earlier in the month we released our GPU supercomputing solutions. Now we have a new set of superserver systems powered by the recently-released AMD Opteron™ 6200-series processors.
Just a couple weeks ago I wrote about new processors from both Intel and AMD. AMD’s 6200-series includes their much-awaited 16-core processor (code-named Interlagos) and utilizes their new Bulldozer architecture. One of the most desirable aspects of these new processors is that they have far superior performance compared to the previous 6100 line, but they remain compatible with the widely-used Socket G34 motherboards. This makes them quite flexible in application.
ICC has released a number of new systems with the AMD Opteron™ 6200 processors in various configurations to meet a wide range of needs. Four of our select systems provide a great snapshot of the different types of solutions we have developed.
This is a big day for the server wars. AMD finally released its new 16-core processors: code-named “Interlagos” and “Valencia.” On the same day, Intel rolled out its new Sandy Bridge-E processors and there is already lots of speculation over whether or not their extra power is worth the price.
But today the spotlight is on AMD. Its 16-core Opteron™ line is a much-anticipated release. Since as early as 2009, we have been hearing about AMD’s plans for 16-core processors. Interlagos is officially known as the Opteron™ 6200, a 12- or 16-core x86 processor that is compatible with Socket G34 motherboards (Magny-Cours & Opteron™ 6100.) Not only does the absolute number of cores enable far superior performance compared to the current Opteron™ 6100 series, but Interlagos is one of the products taking advantage of AMD’s new Bulldozer CPU.
Over the past couple of weeks, we have been adding new configurable products to our online store. In this post, I will cover the workstations, tower servers, and Intel-based quad-CPU rack servers that are now available for sale online.
The main difference between an ICC workstation and an ICC tower server is the motherboard (the chassis are in many cases identical to one another). The workstation motherboards have built-in basic sound cards but no on-board graphics cards (the opposite is true of the tower boards). The workstation is intended for use as a personal computer in a lab or workplace environment, while the tower is for server applications.
Here are the current workstations now available for sale on the ICC store (all Intel Xeon 5600-series dual-processor):
Likewise, here are the links to the current tower server offerings on the ICC online store: Continue reading
Supercomputers have become a vital part of almost any innovative project undertaken by collaborative teams in the developed world. Server clusters can be found anywhere from the offices of small businesses to compartments in U.S. Navy submarines.
So which are the fastest supercomputers on earth? The usual measurement for high-performance computer (HPC) clusters is the TOP500 ranking, which is based on the High Performance LINPACK (HPL) benchmark. LINPACK stands for “linear equations software package”, and the benchmark measures how fast a supercomputer can solve a system of linear equations. The results are reported in units of billions of floating point operations per second (GFLOPS).
The high-performance LINPACK metric has long been the established standard for measuring computing performance, with intense competition worldwide for the lead spot in the TOP500. But some scientists criticize the TOP500 ranking for creating an incomplete picture of how to measure performance. The risk, as Mark Anderson describes in an article in IEEE Spectrum magazine, is motivating computer hardware manufacturers to develop less-effective technologies.
After almost a year-long run, the Jaguar supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee has relinquished its title as the world’s fastest computer. This honor now belongs to the Tianhe-1A supercomputer located in the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China.
Tianhe-1A is expected to officially become the leader of the TOP500.org list of the world’s fastest supercomputers sometime in mid-November. It clocked an impressive 2.507 petaflops on the LINPACK scale, which is about the sum of the performance of supercomputers #6 to #10 on the Top 500 list, according to insideHPC. Jaguar, now the second most powerful supercomputer in the world, had a peak performance of about 1.75 petaflops.
Although Tianhe-1A may re-ignite the anxiety in the West that usually accompanies news of great achievements from East Asia, this is not the first time that America or Europe had lost the #1 place on the Top 500. In 2002, Japan captured the top spot with their Earth Simulator (ES) supercomputer, which remained the world’s fastest until September of 2004 when IBM’s Blue Gene/L cluster at Argonne National Laboratory surpassed it. The quasi-geopolitical competition for computing power is far from over, but China’s ascendancy is actually one of the less interesting things about Tianhe-1A.
Tianhe-1A can potentially usher in a new era in “personal supercomputing”. It is the first leader of the Top 500 to make extensive use of GPUs (Graphics Processing Units). In fact, it is comprised of 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 Intel CPUs. In comparison, Jaguar has 37,376 AMD CPUs and no GPUs.
The Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) standard is one of the leading benchmarks for measuring energy efficiency in a data center. But there are some situations where an energy-efficient change to a data center will actually register as more wasteful by the PUE. For this reason, it’s important to know the gaps in the PUE metric.
Winston Saunders has described just such a case on the Intel Server Room Blog in an article titled, “Turning the Tide: CIO’s dilemma with PUE”.
The dilemma, according to Saunders, is this: “If improving the efficiency of your data center is an important goal, should you incentive [sic] the organization to improve PUE?”
Taken as a goal in and of itself, the PUE may lead data center operators astray. Take this example discussed by Saunders. A data center is running old servers with processors from 2006 (e.g. Intel Xeon 5160). These processors consume more power and perform less calculations than processors that came out in 2010 (e.g. Intel Xeon 5670).
Here’s the problem: if that data center chose to upgrade their old and inefficient servers to newer systems running more efficient and higher-performing processors, the PUE metric of that data center would actually increase (meaning, that data center would be less efficient according to the PUE).
The reason why this would happen is because PUE compares how much energy is consumed by IT equipment in a data center compared to all other energy expenditures (for lighting, cooling the servers, and other infrastructure). So, the more of the total energy is used to power the servers and not the other systems, the better the PUE score and – in theory – the more efficient the data center.
Back to our example of the data center that upgraded its old servers. This data center’s new servers drain less power. This means that the IT portion of total energy consumption in the data center decreases, which means the PUE will register this hardware upgrade as less energy efficient. Of course, the truth of the matter is the exact opposite.
Saunders illustrates the importance of considering PUE in context very well in his article. Anyone responsible for controlling data center costs should consider this (and other) gaps in PUE when making truly energy-efficient decisions.