Intel to develop supercomputers based on light beams
Posted by: Timothy Weaver on 11/17/2014 09:56 AM
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Intel supercomputers will start using light pulses to move data at blistering speeds.
Charlie Wuischpard, vice president and general manager of Intel’s workstations and high-performance computing division, said: “If all your compute nodes are connected via photonics, it does start to make application performance look different.”
Intel’s Thunderbolt technology uses light to connect computers to peripherals like external hard drives at around 20Gbps. Intel has also developed what is called MXC, an optical connector, which can transfer data at speeds of up to 1.6Tbps between servers.
Intel’s technology is key to surpassing exascale computing, in which supercomputer performance is more than 1 exaflop, or million trillion calculations per second. By 2020, Intel wants to make a 1 exaflop supercomputer that can fit into a 20-megawatt data center. At the present time, the fastest computer, Tianhe-2, delivers a peak performance of 33.86 petaflops.
Charlie Wuischpard, vice president and general manager of Intel’s workstations and high-performance computing division, said: “If all your compute nodes are connected via photonics, it does start to make application performance look different.”Intel’s Thunderbolt technology uses light to connect computers to peripherals like external hard drives at around 20Gbps. Intel has also developed what is called MXC, an optical connector, which can transfer data at speeds of up to 1.6Tbps between servers.
Intel’s technology is key to surpassing exascale computing, in which supercomputer performance is more than 1 exaflop, or million trillion calculations per second. By 2020, Intel wants to make a 1 exaflop supercomputer that can fit into a 20-megawatt data center. At the present time, the fastest computer, Tianhe-2, delivers a peak performance of 33.86 petaflops.
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