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UB'S SUPERCOMPUTING CENTER IS TESTING INTEL'S NEWEST HIGH-END CHIP,
THE 64-BIT ITANIUM MICROPROCESSOR FOR USE IN SCIENTIFIC WORKSTATIONS
Published on January 21, 2001
Author: FRED O. WILLIAMS
© The Buffalo News Inc.
Intel's newest and smartest chip, perhaps the engine of tomorrow's supercomputers, is getting quizzed by researchers at the University at Buffalo.
UB's Center for Computational Research is one of a few sites around the country chosen to test computers built on Intel's "Itanium" processor. Troubleshooting the computers, built around Itanium by high-end computer maker Silicon Graphics Inc., gives UB an advance look at the groundbreaking technology, researchers said. It also raises the stature of the two-year-old center a notch, as high-speed computer modeling becomes a widely used research tool. "It's always good for a state-of-the-art facility to stay in close touch with vendors on the leading edge," said Russ Miller, director of the Center for Computational Research at UB's Amherst campus. Delays in the development of Itanium had some wits calling it "Itanic." But in several weeks of testing, the chip has earned perfect marks for accuracy, Miller said. "No one wants to have a repeat of the math error with Pentium," he said, referring to a computation glitch that gave Intel a black eye in 1994. "Very fast, wrong answers don't help you." Just how fast is being kept under wraps. Intel is looking for a performance of about 3.2 billion calculations per second, roughly three times as powerful as current high-end processors, Miller said. Once code-named Merced, Itanium's 64-bit architecture represents a leap from current Intel processors, which can address 32 bits of memory at a time. Capable of processing two or three instructions at once, Itanium chips should be a powerful and relatively inexpensive problem-solving engine when harnessed together in clusters, Miller said. Silicon Graphics asked UB to help it evaluate machines that use test versions of Itanium. The Mountain View, Calif., company supplies one of UB's three main workhorse computers. It chose UB because of the center's experience with research computer techniques and with cluster computing, which combines the power of numerous, relatively inexpensive processors, said Bill Minto, product marketing manager. "They are an ideal partner to do this with," he said. Other computer manufacturers are also working on Itanium-based supercomputers. IBM Corp. announced Tuesday that it plans to install a cluster at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Urbana-Champaign, Ill. Itanium-based computers are expected to go on the market about mid-year. However, they're not expected to land in the conventional desktop environment anytime soon. The chip's cost -- expected to be about $4,000 each in bulk orders, double current high-power chips -- and its incompatibility with existing consumer software will restrict Itanium to scientific workstations and powerful servers for at least a few years, analysts predict. Intel says it will continue to upgrade its consumer-oriented family of 32-bit processors on a parallel track with Itanium. The first-generation Itanium chips are expected to pave the way for a second, more popular wave of 64-bit processors next year, said Kevin Krewell, a senior analyst at MicroDesign Resources in Sunnyvale, Calif. That processor, code-named McKinley, will run faster and deliver better performance, he said. At UB, Miller and a team of four researchers are feeding computation-intensive problems to a cluster of four Itanium-powered machines -- with a total of eight processors -- running on the Linux operating system. The UB software, used in molecular engineering, should uncover any logic flaws lurking in Itanium's 10 million-plus transistors, Miller said. The work will also help refine programming to maximize the new chip's speed. "We know what the theoretical peaks are of a chip -- now, how much can we hit them on real code?" Miller said. Launched in January 1999, the supercomputer center is a tool for research in biology and medicine as well as engineering, as computer modeling becomes a cross-discipline research tool. Now the center, with three main computers, supports 70 research projects across 25 departments at UB and six Western New York companies. Its three main computers -- with a combined processing power of 350 "gigaflops" or billions of instructions per second -- put UB among the highest-powered academic computing sites. Testing programs on the new chip, UB researchers can suggest refinements to the "compiler" software that translates code written by programmers into language understood by machines, Miller said. "With each new version of hardware . . . software always has to catch up," he said.BILL WIPPERT/Buffalo News Russ Miller and four other University at Buffalo researchers are putting Itanium through its paces on computation-intensive molecular engineering problems.
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