Image: Intel
Wired - Five years from, says Intel, your phone could double as a supercomputer.
That’s the goal of Intel’s experimental
Single-chip Cloud Computer
project, or SCC. The company is now researching potential mobile
applications for the chip, as well as developing tools that will make it
easier for developers to take advantage of this technology without
becoming supercomputing experts.
In other words, as ARM seeks to put
cellphone chips into our supercomputers,
Intel is doing the reverse. The lines between the mobile hardware and
data-center hardware are blurring. That may seem odd at first, but if
you step back and look at the bigger picture, it only makes sense.
Big-time data-center operations want the ulta-low-power profiles of the
hardware in our cellphones, and the mobile world is hungry for the
computational punch you get from much larger systems.
Intel Labs technology evangelist Sean Koehl says that its 48-core
creation, first discussed in 2009, acts as a “network” of processors on a
single chip, with two cores per node. The nodes actually communicate to
each other much the same way nodes in a cluster in a data center would.
“We thought there may be some advantages to having an architecture
within a chip that resembles the architecture around it,” he explains.
Intel Labs has been working on many-core chips since around 2004, and
the more immediate applications will probably be in servers and, yes,
supercomputers, which are essentially a bunch of servers working in
tandem. This is often called high-performance computing, or HPC.
Whether you’re dealing with a high-end supercomputer, a cluster of commodity servers running Hadoop, or
a cluster built out of Legos and ultra-cheap Raspberry Pi computers,
HPC depends on parallel processing — breaking down big problems into
smaller problems that are solved by different processors running in
parallel. What Intel Labs is now researching is whether this approach
will make sense for mobile computing.
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