Tag Archive for: cores

Intel unveils X-series platform: up to 18 cores and 36 threads, from $242 to $2,000

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Intel

AMD announced its new high-end desktop (HEDT) platform, the 16 core 32 thread ThreadRipper a couple of weeks ago. At Computex in Taipei, it’s Intel’s turn to update its HEDT platform, and it’s one-upping AMD in the process. The Intel platform, consisting of the new X299 chipset and new X-series processors, will go all the way up to 18 cores and 36 threads.

The HEDT segment is aimed at gamers, video streamers, and content creators with deep pockets or an insatiable desire for more concurrent threads than the mainstream processor segment has to offer. The value proposition for this segment is always a little skewed, with the chips being as much prestige parts as anything else. Straightforward gaming workloads may struggled to make full use of the chips’ resources, but serious Twitch streamers, for example, can make good use of the extra cores. Software developers are another group that can make good use of all those cores.

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Technology Lab – Ars Technica

18 hours, $33K, and 156,314 cores: Amazon cloud HPC hits a “petaflop”

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One point twenty-one petaflops?!
Universal Pictures

What do you do if you need more than 150,000 CPU cores but don’t have millions of dollars to spend on a supercomputer? Go to the Amazon cloud, of course.

For the past few years, HPC software company Cycle Computing has been helping researchers harness the power of Amazon Web Services when they need serious computing power for short bursts of time. The company has completed its biggest Amazon cloud run yet, creating a cluster that ran for 18 hours, hitting 156,314 cores at its largest point and a theoretical peak speed of 1.21 petaflops. (A petaflop is one quadrillion floating point operations per second, or a million billion.)

To get all those cores, Cycle’s cluster ran simultaneously in Amazon data centers across the world, in Virginia, Oregon, Northern California, Ireland, Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney, and São Paulo. The bill from Amazon ended up being $ 33,000.

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Ars Technica » Technology Lab

Cray gives its supercomputers 33 percent more cores with Ivy Bridge upgrade

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The Cray XC30 supercomputer, now with Intel Ivy Bridge.
Cray Inc.

Cray Inc. announced today that it is now equipping versions of its Cray XC30 massively parallel processing supercomputer series with “Ivy Bridge” based Xeon E5-2300 v2 processors. The switch to Ivy Bridge—in both air and water-cooled versions of the two supercomputer lines—will give the systems more cores, better performance, and higher energy efficiency. In addition to the XC30 updates, Cray is also adding the Ivy Bridge processors to its CS300 cluster supercomputers.

The XC30 line, previously known as “Cascade,” is a hybrid next generation high performance-computing platform that uses multiple processor and coprocessor technologies, including Intel’s Xeon Phi parallel processing coprocessor. Designed for a wide array of high-performance applications, it in some ways mirrors the architecture of Tianhe-2, the Chinese supercomputer currently at the top of the TOP500 ranking of supercomputer systems. (Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Titan supercomputer, built by Cray, uses AMD Opteron chips and NVIDIA Tesla GPUs and is currently in second place on TOP500.)

Developed by Cray in collaboration with DARPA’s High Productivity Computing Systems program, it runs on Cray’s Linux Environment and packs up to 384 processors per cabinet. Processors are paired in compute nodes that have 32 to 128 gigabytes of memory, which are connected to each other by a 500 gigabit-per-second switching fabric called the Dragonfly Interconnect.

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Ars Technica » Technology Lab