Will You Still Need Me When I'm Sixty-Core? HPC and Multi-core
Now that all of the major processor vendors have introduced multi-core chips, the impact of this relatively new technology on high-performance computing should to be addressed. What will is the immediate impact on HPC application development? And what will “many-cores” ultimately mean for the future of the HPC cluster?
In case you haven’t noticed, there is a revolution (or evolution) occurring in the computer industry. Recently, all the major processor vendors have introduced multi-core chips composed of multiple processing units in a single package. Instead of having one central processor, computers now have multiple “brains” with which to run programs.
While this technique is not necessarily new, it is the first time these types of architectures have been mass-produced and sold to the commodity PC and server markets. Put simply, the multi-core revolution stands to affect everyone who uses a computer. From laptops, to game consoles, to large servers, the age of multi-core has begun. And, the trend is expected to continue. To an end-user, this change remains hidden; however, the expectation for continued price to performance gains similar to those experienced over the past twenty years will remain.
Alas, programmers using traditional programming methods will find providing additional price to performance for multi-core designs a challenging task. There is no silver bullet or automated technology that adapts current software to operate on multi-core systems.
For the HPC practitioner, however, many of the programming issues facing the rest of the industry are non-issues. The cluster HPC community has in a sense been there, done that. Instead, for the ever-growing HPC crowd, the technology road map begs two crucial questions: How do you program multi-core systems and what implications does multi-core hold for clusters? Before we take a look at these issues, though, a bit…
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