SGI, Intel Plan to Speed up Supercomputers 500 Times by 2018

From PC World: 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.

Standard x86 CPUs will need accelerators like Intel's MIC chips to achieve faster performance, Goh said.

View: Article @ Source Site