Intel Introduces The Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor

Marking a new era in high-performance computing, Intel Corporation introduced the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor, a culmination of years of the research and collaboration, to bring unprecedented performance for innovative breakthroughs in manufacturing, life sciences, energy and other areas. The ability to quickly compute, simulate and make more informed decisions has propelled the growth of high performance computing (HPC) and analytics. This has been driven by global business and research priorities to more accurately predict weather patterns, create more efficient energy resources, and develop cures for diseases among many other pressing issues. With the breakthrough performance per watt and other new attributes of Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor, the industry will have even greater reliability in generating accurate answers, help proliferate high-performance computing beyond laboratories and universities and achieve maximum productivity.

“Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor represents an achievement in Intel innovation that will help propel us to new heights in research and discovery, and reaffirms our commitment to Exascale-level computing,” said Diane Bryant, Vice President and General Manager of the Datacentre and Connected Systems Group. “The combination of the Intel Xeon processor family and the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor will change the scope and scale of what highly parallel applications can accomplish, by delivering unprecedented performance, efficiency and programmability. With this technology as a new foundation for HPC, solving real-world challenges from accurately predicting weather patterns 21 days in advance, to developing new cures for diseases will become increasingly possible.”

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Based on the Intel Many Integrated Core (Intel MIC) architecture, Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors will complement the existing Intel Xeon processor E5-2600/4600 product families to deliver unprecedented performance for highly parallel applications. The Intel Xeon processor E5 family is a high-performance computing workhorse that has powered numerous Top500 systems to Petascale performance (1 quadrillion floating point operations per second). Now with Intel Xeon Phi products handling much of the “highly parallel” processing to help supercomputers produce answers for a wide range of scientific and technical disciplines such as genetic research, oil and gas exploration and climate modeling, Intel believes that this powerful combination will help blaze a path to Exascale computing, which would mark a thousand-fold increase in computational capabilities over Petascale.

The Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor takes advantage of familiar programming languages, parallelism models, techniques and developer tools available for the Intel architecture. This helps ensure that software companies and IT departments are equipped with greater use of parallel code without retraining developers on proprietary and hardware specific programming models associated with accelerators. Intel is providing the software tools to help scientists and engineers optimise their code to take full advantage of Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, including Intel Parallel Studio XE and Intel Cluster Studio XE. Available today, these tools enable code optimisation and, through using the same programming languages and models shared by Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors and Intel Xeon processors E5 product family, help applications benefit both from tens of Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor cores and also from more efficient use of Intel Xeon processor threads.

Built with Intel’s most advanced 22-nanometer, 3-D tri-gate transistors, Intel is introducing two new Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor families that provide optimal performance and performance-per-watt for highly parallel HPC workloads.

The Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor 3100 family will provide great value for those seeking to run compute-bound workloads such as life science applications and financial simulations. The Intel Xeon Phi 3100 family will offer more than 1000 Gigaflops (1 TFlops) double-precision performance, support for up to 6GB memory at 240GB/sec bandwidth, and a series of reliability features including memory error correction codes (ECC). The family will operate within a 300W thermal design point (TDP) envelope.

The Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor 5110Pprovides additional performance at a lower power envelope. It reaches 1,011 Gigaflops(1.01 TFlops) double-precision performance, and supports 8GB of GDDR5 memory at a higher 320 GB/sec memory bandwidth. With 225 watts TDP, the passively cooled Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor 5110Pdelivers power efficiency that is ideal for dense computing environments, and is aimed at capacity-bound workloads such as digital content creation and energy research. This processor has been delivered to early customers and featured in the 40th edition of the top500 list.

To provide early access to new Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor technology for customers such as Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), Intel has additionally offered customised products: Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor SE10X and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor SE10P. These offer 1073 GFlops double precision performance at a 300W TDP with rest of the specification similar to Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor 5110P.