Tag Archives: architecture

Cost: The Biggest Pothole on the Exascale Road

Recently, industry analyst John Barr wrote at the ISC blog about “Potholes on the Road to Exascale”. John speaks about a unified programming environment that should be able to support all sorts of computing devices of the future. That’s right: … Continue reading

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Using Eight Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessors for Asteroid Simulation

Colfax International is a US-based IT equipment and solution provider. What’s so special about them is that their web-based retail shop, Colfax Direct, lists thousands of items ready to be shipped, and all prices are available online, with no dumb … Continue reading

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Many-core and InfiniBand: Making Your Own CPUs Gives You Independence

The headline sounds like the obvious thing: of course, if you can make your own CPUs for your projects, then you don’t have to rely on CPU manufacturers. “But wait”, you would ask, “Aren’t CPU design and manufacture very expensive?” … Continue reading

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AMD Promises Hybrid CPU+GPU Device with Uniform Memory Access

The idea of using graphics hardware to perform computations dates back to 1978. However, AMD claims that it was them who “kicked off the GPGPU revolution” in November 2006. What is really important is that it was standardisation that allowed … Continue reading

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Memory Bandwidth for Intel Xeon Phi (And Friends)

John D. McCalpin, Ph.D., informally known as “Dr. Bandwidth” for his invention of STREAM memory bandwidth benchmark, posted STREAM results for Intel Xeon Phi and two Xeon-based servers made by Dell (see the end of his blog entry). All three … Continue reading

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Intel MIC, aka Xeon Phi, aka Doubtful Creativity

They created a monster. It contains enough cores to be a computer on its own — yet it needs to be plugged into a “real” computer, and acts only as an accelerator. It’s cores are based on P54C architecture, introduced … Continue reading

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X86 Has to Go Away, Revolution is Necessary

Sometimes I visit big vendors’ presentations where they talk about their new servers. The audience — systems administrators, engineers, technicians — are listening very carefully, trying to grasp every word. They like to hear that the new server, equipped with … Continue reading

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