Floating point accelerator: IT will eventually have a free lunch?

The world's fastest supercomputers floating-point accelerator have huge high-end performance improvements.

Super computer represents the forefront of computer field, they in promoting mature technology aspects played a crucial role, but also can help new solution into the general data center and even the mainstream of computing solutions. The latest of the world's fastest supercomputers Top500 list also shows high performance and a great progress, it is more and more dependent on floating point accelerator, now includes the Intel's first competitive products, xeon Phi. Intel said floating-point accelerator programming will become easy to some.

If you want to enter the November 2012 Top500 list super computer, it must provide at least 76.4 TFlops continuous performance. Five years ago, the number in the top ten, and enough in eight years ago took enough. At present the fastest supercomputer, oak ridge national laboratory of Titan, 17.6 PFlops, and global before 22 department super computer can provide at least 1 Pflop.

The ascension of the computing power than the more amazing is to promote the efficiency of. For example, the Titan provide performance is five years ago the fastest supercomputer livermore national laboratory BlueGene/L (478.2 TFlops) of 36 times, but its power consumption is 3.5 times (8209 kw to 2329 kw). To promote the efficiency of the main reasons, understandable from more CPU, but super computer are increasingly using floating-point accelerator, such as Nvidia Tesla series or AMD FirePro series and so on general GPU (GPGPU), and Intel released xeon Phi coprocessor.

The Titan integrated 18688 single Nvidia Tesla K20X processor, with a total of 46645248 CUDA processing unit. King abdullah AMD in science and technology city of super computer SANAM deployed 420 pieces of FirePro S10000 graphics, a total of 1505280 stream processor, university of Tennessee computer science national institute of super computer Beacon, use an unknown number of Phi 5110 p, each with sixty processor. The three department super computer was named the best performance in the world today the super computer.