SC14 HPC News Roundup

A number of key announcements were made at SC14 with implications for the future of the HPC marketplace. Here’s a roundup of key announcements and big news to come out of SC14 last week in New Orleans:

+ Intel Shares Details about Future Plans for Xeon Phi
Intel gave SC14 attendees a look at the roadmap for the future of its Xeon Phi coprocessor, sharing details about the upcoming “Knights Landing” chips, which are expected to debut in 2015, and laid out plans to increase floating point performance with the eventual “Knights Hill.”

+ IBM to Build the Department of Energy’s Next Generation Coral Supercomputers
It’s expected that the new Summit system at Oak Ridge will push the 150 to 300 peak petaflop barrier. IBM, NVIDIA, and Mellanox collaborated to create an architecture with a smaller number of nodes for far higher performance and a much larger shared memory footprint. At 3,400 nodes, Summit will be at least 5x the performance of Titan at one-fifth the size.

+ Nvidia Announces the Tesla K80 Graphics Card with 24 GB of RAM
At the outset of SC14 Nvidia announced another stride forward with its PC graphics chips. The updated Tesla K80 graphics card is its fastest graphics product to date. The K80 delivers 8.74 teraflops of single-precision performance and has two times the performance and memory bandwidth of its predecessor, the K40.

+ IDC Shares Insights into the HPC Marketplace
On the second day of SC14 the IDC hosted a breakfast and shared a detailed look at the current state of the HPC market. Among the key points: storage is the fastest growing segment in HPC, accounting for $4.1 billion in 2012. IDC predicts storage will grow to $6 billion by 2017.

We want to thank everyone who visited the Advanced Clustering booth at SC14 to hear about our turn-key HPC solutions. If you missed us or weren’t able to attend SC14, contact us today to hear more about the latest HPC solutions (hardware and software) or the special offer we have right now on the Intel® Xeon Phi™ Coprocessor 31S1P. If you missed our on-site demo, you can learn more about our web-based job submission tool, eQUEUE, today.