Mass. schools team up for supercomputer center
At a gritty industrial site occupied a century ago by a textile mill, five universities are collaborating to install supercomputers that will recreate the start of the universe and perform other research.
The developers of the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center, which is being built and is expected to be operating by the end of next year, were drawn to Holyoke for the same reason industrialists flocked to the city in the 19th century: cheap water power from the Connecticut River.
"It's coming full circle for us," said John Goodhue, executive director of the project. Read more...
SGI, Intel plan to speed supercomputers 500 times by 2018
Silicon Graphics International hopes by 2018 to build supercomputers 500 times faster than the most powerful today, using specially designed accelerator chips made by Intel, SGI's chief technology officer said.
SGI hopes to bring a massive performance boost to its supercomputers through highly parallel processors based on Intel's MIC (many integrated cores) architecture, said Eng Lim Goh, CTO at SGI. In conjunction with Xeon server CPUs, the MIC chips will run millions of threads in parallel, which will help scale supercomputer performance.
Chips based on the MIC architecture mix standard x86 cores with specialized cores to boost high-performance computing. Today's fastest supercomputers top out at around 2.5 petaflops (2.5 thousand trillion calculations per second), but efforts to improve throughput and on-chip performance are under way. IBM, for example, said it will use pulses of light to accelerate data transfers between chips. These and other measures could lead to supercomputers that can deliver performance of over one exaflop, or 1000 petaflops, by 2020. Read more...