There are a number of constants in the universe: Gravity, the speed of light and the demand for speed in data centres.
Intel Corp. is trying to address the latter by shipping the 60-core Xeon Phi coprocessor, which accelerates highly-parallel applications. This isn’t for an enteprise resource management suite but largely aimed at large data centres used by researchers, scientists and engineers. A story in ComputerWorld U.S. outlines what the company hopes to achieve.
At the same time Intel and HP also announced a new Superdome 2 computer in HP’s Integrity system line, powered by Intel’s Itanium 9500 processors.
Intel says the Xeon Phi coprocessor will be visible to applications as a high performance computing-optimized, highly-parallel, separate compute node that runs its own Linux-based operating system independent of the host OS. That allows more flexibility in cluster solutions that are not available with other graphics accelerator-based technologies, the company says.
Intel said earlier this year the first Xeon Phi coprocessor-based development cluster was ranked 150th on the Top500 list of supercomputers, delivering 118 TerraFlops of performance.
Some 44 server manufacturers including Bull, Cray, Dell, HP, IBM, Inspur, SGI and NEC say they will build systems around the coproocessor.
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