As Roadrunner Breaks Petaflop Barrier, Heterogeneous Computing in the Spotlight

Yay for heterogenous computing! Anyone remember Intel's "Project Z" being discussed back in the Northwood P4C days?

 

Things seem to arise and disappear all the time in terms of Intel's internal projects. I do remember the Project Z rumors, as I used to pay close attention to all the ex-Alpha movements, but... who knows. According to previous roadmaps of Intel's they should in theory have their own heterogeneous efforts in mind going into the next decade, but who knows the extent to which that is still at play. I suppose that Larrabee grafted onto some more mainstream chip would still qualify, but as it'd be fully ISA compatible, I don't know... I have trouble calling it truly heterogeneous.

It'll be fun to see the Top500 list a couple of years from now though. Specifically, it'll be interesting to see what Intel's efforts are in the supercomputing space, and whether any supercomputers start being built from clustered GPGPU workstations - though it seems a lot more complex from a system/network perspective to harness that computational power at the scale of a supercomputing center than at the desktop level. But there will no doubt be something.

And as a fan of it, I hope that a couple of more Cell-based systems make it onto the list as well. With the QS22 essentially the heart of it, should be easy enough for institutions to mirror the Los Alamos system, with a lot of the library/framework problems already solved and provided in IBMs tools.

 

Article on Roadrunner's first set of tasked simulations over on the Los Alamos website:

http://www.lanl.gov/news/index.php/fuseaction/home.story/story_id/13602


I like the novel tasks/research they are assigning to the system before it goes all-nuclear.

 

Awesome point.