The
University of Tennessee’s National Institute for Computational Sciences
(NICS) announced today at SC11 that it has entered a multi-year
strategic engagement with Intel Corporation to pursue development of
next-generation, high-performance computing solutions based on the Intel
Many Integrated Core (Intel MIC) architecture and the design of
scientific applications emphasizing a sustainable approach for both
performance and productivity.
Funded
by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and located at Oak Ridge
National Laboratory, NICS manages the Cray XT5 “Kraken,” the NSF’s most
productive supercomputer. Intel is the world’s leader in silicon
innovation and the designer of the Intel MIC architecture. Together,
NICS and Intel make a formidable team for high-performance computing
(HPC) development.
Next-generation
systems based on the Intel MIC architecture will combine multi-core
Intel Xeon processors with Intel MIC co-processors. Such systems are
expected to propel high-end computing from its current status at the
petascale level to its future at the exascale level, when machines will
be capable of a thousand trillion calculations per second.
Constructed
around many-core processors that utilize the venerable x86 instruction
set, the Intel MIC architecture will prove more versatile and
serviceable than architectures based on graphics processing units
(GPUs). Users will be able to reuse their existing codes and programming
knowledge, allowing for immediate scientific discovery and increased
productivity. Further, users will be able to use standardized approaches
and tools such as OpenMP and Intel® Parallel Studio to optimize their
codes to achieve high performance on both host processors and
co-processors.
“NICS
has provided insight to Intel regarding the technology requirements of
the scientific computing community,” says Joe Curley, director of
marketing for Intel’s Technical Computing Group. “The impact of our
partnership can be seen in the focus of our Intel MIC ‘Knights Ferry’
software development platform on extending well understood, high-level,
standard programming languages and models.”
NICS
is committed to assisting NSF users with their transition to the Intel
MIC architecture by researching parallelization techniques on the Intel
MIC platform and by porting key NSF applications to the Intel MIC
architecture in advance of its commercial release. NICS will also offer
training on the Intel MIC architecture following its commercial debut.
NICS
has already successfully ported millions of lines of code—full
applications using MPI and OpenMP, not just kernels—from a variety of
scientific and engineering disciplines to the Intel MIC architecture.
Now, NICS is preparing to expand its efforts by developing partnerships
with NSF research teams to port and optimize key NSF research codes. To
facilitate this activity, NICS is working with Intel to provide a
cluster based on the Intel MIC architecture for use by NSF project teams
early next year.
The
National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) is a joint effort
of the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory that is
funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Located on the campus
of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, NICS is a major partner in NSF’s
Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE).