Intel Brings Supercomputing Horsepower to Big Data Analytics

Intel unveiled its new high-performance computing roadmap and announced new software tools for data analytics at the recent SC13 conference.

"In the last decade, the high-performance computing community has created a vision of a parallel universe where the most vexing problems of society, industry, government and research are solved through modernized applications," said Raj Hazra, Intel vice president and general manager of the Technical Computing Group. "Intel technology has helped HPC evolve from a technology reserved for an elite few to an essential and broadly available tool for discovery. The solutions we enable for ecosystem partners for the second half of this decade will drive the next level of insight from HPC. Innovations will include scale through standards, performance through application modernization, efficiency through integration and innovation through customized solutions."

Intel plans to deliver customized HPC products to meet the diverse needs of customers. During the conference, the company unveiled how the next generation Intel Xeon Phi product (codenamed "Knights Landing"), available as a host processor, will fit into standard rack architectures and run applications entirely natively instead of requiring data to be offloaded to the coprocessor. According to the company, this will reduce programming complexity and eliminate "offloading" of the data, thus improving performance and decreasing latencies caused by memory, PCIe and networking.

Knights Landing will also offer developers three memory options to optimize performance.

In addition, Intel and Fujitsu announced an initiative that could potentially replace a computer's electrical wiring with fiber optic links to carry Ethernet or PCI Express traffic over an Intel Silicon Photonics link. This enables Xeon Phi coprocessors to be installed in an expansion box, separated from host Xeon processors, but functioning as if they were still located on the motherboard.

Intel also announced its HPC Distribution for Apache Hadoop software (Intel HPC Distribution) that combines the Intel Distribution for Hadoop software with Intel Enterprise Edition of Lustre software to deliver what the company describes as an enterprise-grade solution for storing and processing large data sets. It allows users to run their MapReduce applications, without change, directly on shared, Lustre-powered storage.

The Intel Cloud Edition for Lustre software is a scalable, parallel file system that is available through the Amazon Web Services Marketplace and allows users to pay-as-you go to maximize storage performance and cost effectiveness, the company says. The software is suited for dynamic applications, including rapid simulation and prototyping. In the case of urgent or unplanned work that exceeds a user's on-premise compute or storage performance, the software can be used for cloud bursting HPC workloads to quickly provision the infrastructure needed before moving the work into the cloud.

For more information, visit Intel.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.