TACC "Stampede" Supercomputer To Go Live In January

Nerval's Lobster writes "The Texas Advanced Computing Center plans to go live on January 7 with "Stampede," a ten-petaflop supercomputer predicted to be the most powerful Intel supercomputer in the world once it launches. Stampede should also be among the top five supercomputers in the TOP500 list when it goes live, Jay Boisseau, TACC's director, said at the Intel Developer Forum Sept. 11. Stampede was announced a bit more than two years ago. Specs include 272 terabytes of total memory and 14 petabytes of disk storage. TACC said the compute nodes would include "several thousand" Dell Stallion servers, with each server boasting dual 8-core Intel E5-2680 processors and 32 gigabytes of memory. In addition, TACC will include a special pre-release version of the Intel MIC, or "Knights Bridge" architecture, which has been formally branded as Xeon Phi. Interestingly, the thousands of Xeon compute nodes should generate just 2 teraflops worth of performance, with the remaining 8 generated by the Xeon Phi chips, which provide highly parallelized computational power for specialized workloads."

Comments

Summary: s/tera/peta/

[gentryx]

The summary mentions that 2 teraflops are generated by the CPUs while 8 are generated by the Knights Bridge chips. It should say petaflops.

Re:Why so little memory?

[Shinobi]

Esoteric? Nearly impossible to program for? Methinks you haven't read through the actual docs for it. You can use all the standard Intel tools to program for it, which are also MIC-aware, just like you program for a standard multi-core CPU. That includes the threading and math kernel libraries, as well as OpenCL if you want to go that route.

Re:Why so little memory?

[gentryx]

Agreed. 2 GB/core seems to be the current agreement on almost all machines except for IBM BlueGene which has just 1 GB per core.