Intel Aims For Exaflop Supercomputer By 2018 and Cray claims current XK6 maxes out at 50 petaflops

Intel laid down its roadmap in terms of computing performance for the next eight or so years in a press release, and revealed its expectations until 2027.

A current TFLOPS machine currently consumes around 5 Kilowatts, Intel estimates that an Exascale TFLOPS machine would sip only 20 Watts; in other words, a 1000x performance improvement that’s accompanied by a “mere” 10x power increase.

Intel also announced that its first MIC (Many Integrated Core) product, codenamed Knights Corner, will be produced using its just announced 22nm 3D Trigate manufacturing process, while its software development platform “Knights Ferry” is already being shipped to selected partners.

By 2013 Intel expects the top 100 supercomputers in the world to use one million processors. By 2015 this number is expected to double, and is forecasted to reach 8 million units by the end of the decade.

In 2015 we could apparently see a performance of 100 PetaFLOP/s in 2015 and break the barrier of 1 ExaFLOP/s in 2018.

If Intel achieves it roadmap for chips and gets to 14 nanometer node in 2013 and 10 nanometers in 2015 and 7 nanometers in 2017, then it will be far easier to achieve the supercomputer goals at earlier dates.

In May, 2011, Cray said they can achieve 50 petaflops, or 50 quadrillion floating point operations per second using a maxed out XK6 supercomputer (if they can get a buyer).

The Cray XK6 Supercomputer handles it with a combination of AMD’s 16-core, x86 Opteron 6200 Series server processors with Nvidia’s Tesla 20-Series graphics processors and Cray’s Linux-based operating system called Gemini interconnect.

The National Security Agency is designing a new $895.6 million supercomputing center that will be constructed at its Fort Meade, Md., headquarters over the next several years, Department of Defense budget documents reveal. The NSA’s new High Performance Computing Center, slated to be complete by December 2015, will be designed to with energy efficiency, security, and lots of “state-of-the-art” computing horsepower in mind, according to unclassified specs found in the documents. The NSA appears to be making an exaflop supercomputer in 2015.

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