14 DAY TRIAL // The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas announced just recently that it plans to use a grant received from the National Science Foundation to build the world's first supercomputer running Intel MIC "Knights Corner" accelerators.
The Knights Corner highly parallel accelerator cards will be paired together with eight-core Xeon E5 processors based on the Sandy Bridge-E architecture in order to deliver a whopping 10petaFLOPS of computing power.
"Stampede is the most powerful x86-based Linux HPC cluster announced for deployment in the U.S. at this time,” said Jay Boisseau, the director of TACC.
“The system builds on TACC's history of continuously deploying larger and more powerful x86 Linux clusters that enable new scientific breakthroughs.
“It will also be the first large-scale implementation of Intel's MIC architecture-based products," concluded TACC's rep.
TACC's Stampede system is expected to be completed in early 2013, and will be comprised of several thousands Dell "Zeus" servers, each one of these coming with two eight-core processors paired with 32GB of memory.
These will be combined with Intel MIC "Knights Corner" accelerators, with 50 processing cores each, offering a total of 8PFLOPS of peak performance to add to the other 2PFLOPS delivered by the CPUs.
Furthermore, Stampede will also include 128 next-generation Nvidia Quadro graphics based on the Kepler architecture which will be used for remote visualization, another 16 Dell servers for data analysis, and a Lustre file system for data-intensive computing.
All these will be interconnected through an InfiniBand FDR 56Gb/s network. Outside of the 10PFLOPS of peak performance, Stampede will also deliver 272TB of total memory, and 14PB of disk storage.
Today's fastest supercomputer, according to the TOP500 list, is the K computer installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe, Japan. The system uses 68544 eight-core SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs in order to reach a maximum performance of 8PFLOPS. (via Xbit Labs)