Intel and NEC Plan to Pool Their Resources and Build the Future's Supercomputers

HPCs or supercomputers are used in science, medicine and by non-profit organizations and businesses such as oil and gas exploration to speed research and testing. Although four out of five among the top 500 supercomputers have Intel processors inside, the fact that it just barely got the fifth place in the TOP500 list, while AMD-based supercomputers got all four leading ranks, must have irked Intel enough to drive it into a full collaboration with the Japanese enterprise NEC. The two actually intend to jointly create HPCs (high-performance computing platforms) and even implement certain chip innovations specifically designed for supercomputing environments.

“Intel's substantial investment in the Intel architecture, including the development of processors, chipsets, software compilers and other related products has expanded the usages of Intel Xeon processors in both the volume and high-end HPC market segments. Now with NEC further innovating on Intel Xeon processor-based systems, Intel is poised to bring Intel Xeon processor performance to an even wider supercomputing audience,” Richard Dracott, general manager of Intel's HPC group, said.

This would imply that Intel's next-generation Xeon processors featuring the Sandy Bridge micro-architecture will be complemented by NEC-developed AVX (Advanced Vector Extensions). This would lead to a performance-speed increase. The two enterprises will supposedly start by developing hardware and software aimed at enhancing the memory bandwidth and scalability of the Xeon-based platforms, enhancements meant to improve not just supercomputing, but also smaller HPC systems. This means that the Xeon CPUs will actually compete with NEC's SX vector processors. Nevertheless, the Tokyo-based company means to keep selling such SX products, implying that AVX-enabled chips, Itanium and SX can be promoted alongside each other.

“NEC's substantial experience in the development of vector processing systems, including vector pipeline management, memory sub-systems, and high speed interconnect technology is a natural fit for taking Intel architecture further into new markets. NEC will enrich its HPC product portfolio through this collaboration as well as continuous enhancement of its vector supercomputer,” Fumihiko Hisamitsu, general manager of HPC division at NEC, added.