Home » , » Intel turns to light beams to speed up supercomputers

Intel turns to light beams to speed up supercomputers

Intel turns to light beams to speed up supercomputers:

Intel can begin mistreatment light-weight pulses next year to maneuver information at blistering speeds in supercomputers, yielding doubtless large advances in superior computing.



It will use optical cables to maneuver information additional quickly than typical copper wiring for linking computing and storage units. That quicker information movement ought to improve system performance overall.

"If all of your cipher nodes ar connected via photonics, it will begin to create application performance look totally different," aforementioned Charlie Wuischpard, vice chairman and top dog of Intel's workstations and superior computing division.

Light pulses ar already used for power-efficient and high-speed information transfers over communications networks, and also are finding an area in PCs and information centers. Intel's Thunderbolt technology uses light-weight to attach computers to peripherals like external laborious drives at around 20Gbps. Intel has conjointly developed associate degree optical connexion referred to as MXC which will transfer information at speeds of up to one.6Tbps between servers.

Optics can bring performance advances whereas reducing power consumption, aforementioned Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight sixty four.

Supercomputers have plenty of cupboards, processing, and storage units and racks, and moving signals between all the units uses additional power than process itself.

Optical technology needs "a heap less power to send the signal in any absolute distance," Brookwood aforementioned.

One challenge has been building optical interfaces at an affordable value, however Intel has found an economical thanks to attach transmitters and receivers to systems, Brookwood aforementioned.

"Silicon photonics is technology whose time is coming back," Brookwood aforementioned.

For Intel, optical technology is additionally key in surpassing the milestone of exascale computing, during which mainframe computer performance is over one exaflop, or million trillion calculations per second. Intel desires to create a one exaflop mainframe computer by 2020 to 2022 which will slot in a 20-megawatt information center. The quickest laptop within the world, Tianhe-2, delivers a peak performance of thirty three.86 petaflops.

Intel has researched atomic number 14 photonics for over a decade. The optical affiliation technology are going to be a part of Intel's Omni-Path networking platform and can be out there as an alternate to copper connections. it'll keep company with Intel's Knights Landing supercomputing chip, which can be in supercomputers next year. The chip has further technology like DDR4 DRAM and a replacement variety of stacked HMC (Hybrid Memory Cube) memory to spice up supercomputing performance.

Intel did not share additional details on the protocol that may be used for optical information transfers. Wuischpard aforementioned additional data are going to be shared at a later date. Omni-Path is not supported Infiniband and Intel hasn't aforementioned if it might be supported local area network or PCI-Express.

Other firms also are staring at optical technology. IBM is researching optics for on-chip communication between transistors, one thing Intel has not incontestible or talked regarding however.

0 comments:

Post a Comment