Maximum PC Intel Developer Forum RSS Feed

SGI Unveils "Personal Supercomputer" Octane III

Paul Lilly — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 08:12:42 -0500

If you've ever dreamed about owning a supercomputer, SGI has your back. During the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) that kicked off today and runs until Thursday, SGI introduced what it describes as a "personal supercomputer" called the Octane III. More than just marketing hype, the Octane III comes ready to accommodate up to 80 high-performance cores and just shy of 1TB of memory.

"This new product takes high-performance computing to a new level by combining the immense power and performance capabilities of a high-performance deskside cluster with the portability and usability of a workstation," SGI said in a statement. "The Octane III is uniquely suited for workplace environments and supports a vast range of distributed technical computing applications."

The Octane III will ship with a pre-installed platform with support for several HPC applications, including fluid dynamics, quantum mechanics, molecular dynamics, CAD, and a bunch of other geeky stuff that has nothing to do with running Crysis or gaming in general.

Cost of entry will start at around $8,000.

Image Credit: SGI

Hands-on with Deep Viewer, Intel's Potential Killer-App for Nehalem

Norman Chan — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 16:30:00 -0500

During a private briefing with Intel at IDF yesterday to talk about Nehalem, we were given a demo of some cool software in development that makes good use of the multi-threaded cores of the new CPU. Francois Piednoel, the Senior Performance Analyst (ie. benchmarking guru) at Intel describes Deep Viewer as a "science project" of sorts. It's an image sorting application that they acquired from an independent software developer that reminds us of Microsoft Live Labs' Seadragon technology (which is used in the recently released Photosynth online app). We're talking about near-infinite scaling of visual data (in this case photos and videos) being processed in real-time on your display.

In the first part of the demo, we were introduced to a Core i7-powered system running in tri-channel memory mode with a fancy-looking 30" display. The monitor was actually a touchscreen (enabled by that exposed silicon around the bezel) and one of the things Francois did first was move some objects around with his finger.

When it started up, the Deep Viewer app showed a small calendar grid next to a world map. Pinching the calendar -- like gesturing on an iPhone -- expanded the frame. And as the grid grew, we could see images populating the space within each calendar day. Francois kept zooming in, and more images revealed themselves on the fly.

This was actually 200GB worth of images, stored off of a 500GB hard drive. Over 224 terapixels of data was accessible in this demo, being streamed into view and processed in real-time. The scaling was incredibly fast, and we were told the app didn't store any cache or pre-process files. The images that popped up to full resolution as we zoomed in weren't just jpegs, either. RAW photos, bitmaps, and other image formats all work with Deep Viewer -- legacy file and codec support is one of the reasons a general-purpose CPU is optimal for this kind of app.

In addition to images, many of the thumbnails were actually videos, too! 640x480 (non-HD) clips shot with a power-and-shoot camera were split up into indexed scenes and played alongside the high-res jpegs. One really cool feature is the app's ability to run facial recognition algorithms on videos when you zoom in on them. We focused on a scene of some passengers walking off of a train, and a red circle highlighted each face to pick up details and find matches in other photos in the database.

Hit up the next page for more!

Looking at the CPU usage during the demo, we could see the Nehalem chip really being taxed as we zoomed in, but we never noticed any hiccups in the performance. Intel's argument is that this is the kind of application that users should be demanding from software developers -- something that'll really utilize the CPU's processing potential.

The magnetic hard drive was cited as the biggest bottleneck in the application, so we were shown another system running with 4 new Intel SSDs configured in RAID. Zooming into the Deep Viewer calendar on this machine looked just as smooth as on the drive-based HD equipped system, but this time, all the images being processed were large RAW image files.

Of course, we don't all have 30" touchscreen displays, so we were shown another technology that Francois is working on in his own off-time -- a motion sensor for Deep Viewer using a standard webcam. He demonstrated gesture controls by putting his hands two feet away from the webcam, pinching and waving in the air to navigate through the interface. His homebrew software looked responsive and accurate, and with a little more work, could bring that awesome motion-gesture tech from the Minority Report film to life.

Intel isn't making any promises that Deep Viewer will be released for free (or even at all). It's definitely an impressive visual computing application that innovates photo album sorting. Once they spruce up the GUI and optimize the software a little more, Deep Viewer could be a real killer-app for Nehalem.

Why SATA Revision 3? Ask the SSDs!

Mark Edward Soper — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 22:39:32 -0500

Monday, we told you about the forthcoming SATA Revision 3.0, also known as SATA 6Gb/s. Given the fact that conventional hard disks still don't saturate the original SATA 1.5Gb/s bus, let alone the mainstream SATA Revision 2.0 3Gb/s bus, why bother with another speedup?

In a word: SSDs. The Inquirer reports that the new Intel solid-state drives introduced this week at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) come very close to saturating the SATA 3Gb/s bus with 250MB/s read speed, while blowing the doors off conventional hard disks and third-party SSDs. And, they're not alone. As we reported Monday, Indilinx isn't far behind, offering the 230MB/s Barefoot SSD drive controller.

So, what makes some SSD drives faster (or slower) than others? SSD drive performance is affected by two factors: the speed of the controller and the speed of the SSD memory chips. Currently, the fastest SSD drives use single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash, while drives using multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash trade higher capacity for slightly slower performance. As capacities climb and performance zooms, it's going to be an interesting fall and winter in the SSD business. Click here for more of our coverage of SSD technology and products.

That's the good news. The Inquirer also reports that the SATA-IO's Power over eSATA initiative, announced in January, is now expected to be released in early 2009 (rather than late this year as was originally expected). Power over eSATA will enable eSATA drives to pull their power from the eSATA port, just as many USB drives get their power from the USB port. Whenever Power over eSATA appears (and let's hope they come up with a cooler acronym than the logical "PoeSATA"), it will be very helpful in getting eSATA to become mainstream.

Illustration courtesy The Inquirer.

Nehalem Has a Turbo Mode

Chris Moody — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 12:54:56 -0500

At yesterday’s Intel Developer Forum keynote, Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group discussed new features of the company's next-generation processor family including a new turbo mode. This turbo mode shifts the processor into a higher gear for ‘mind-blowing performance’ without a heat penalty.

On Nehalem based CPUs, Intel has introduced a technology that it calls ‘power gating’. Basically, when one or more of the cores on a Nehalem chip are not in use and powered down, the processor can divert power to the cores that are running by increasing their voltage and clockspeed.

"Our engineers have put together an incredible processing family here that will include a tremendous amount of new processor features all centered on delivering faster computer performance and terrific energy efficiency," Gelsinger said.

This next-generation Core microarchitecture features Intel Hyper-Threading Technology delivering up to 8-threaded performance capability on 4 cores in the initial versions. Nehalem is predicted to offer more cores in future versions. It also contains the much vaunted new QuickPath Interconnect. QuickPath is a technology that connects processors, chipsets and memory together, and delivers up to three times the memory bandwidth of previous generation processors.

It is no wonder that when Gordon Mah Ung did his sneak peek of Nehalem, it was so impressive. I want mine yesterday, please.