Exascale performance feasible by 2020 says Intel

An ExaFlop/s is quintillion computer operations per second, hundreds of times faster than current supercomputers. Kirk Skaugen, Intel's vice president and general manager at the Data Center Group, pictured, made the announcement at the International Supercomputing Conference. According to Skaugen, reaching exascale levels of performance in the future will not only require combined efforts by industry and governments, but also approaches being pioneered by the Intel Integrated Core architecture. For today's fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A in China, to achieve exascale performance, it would require more than 1.6GW of power. Intel and European researchers have sought to address this energy efficiency challenge by establishing three European labs with three main goals: to create a sustained partner presence in Europe; take advantage of the growing relevance of European high performance computing research; and exponentially grow capabilities in computational science, engineering and strategic computing. One of the technical goals of the labs is to create simulation applications that begin to address the energy efficiency challenges of moving to exascale performance. "While Intel Xeon processors are the clear architecture of choice for the current TOP500 list of supercomputers, Intel is further expanding its focus on high performance computing by enabling the industry for the next frontier with our Many Integrated Core architecture for petascale and future exascale workloads," said Skaugen. "Intel is uniquely equipped with unparalleled manufacturing technologies, new architecture innovations and a familiar software programming environment that will bring us closer to this exciting exascale goal."