On the virtual supercomputer conference SC ’20 Intel manager Trish Damkroger gives an outlook on the third Xeon SP generation “Ice Lake” and announces some supercomputers equipped with it.

In addition, Damkroger confirms that 2021 first Sapphire Rapids Xeons of the fourth Xeon SP generation are coming, which will bring DDR5 memory and PCI Express 5.0 with the coherent extension CXL for computing accelerators.

As part of the Aurora exascale supercomputer project, developers at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) now have access to early prototypes of Xe-HP compute accelerators. The latter are to be used as Xe HPC alias “Ponte Vecchio” from the 7 nanometer production in Aurora and can be programmed via oneAPI.

Ice Lake-SP with 32 cores The Ice-Lake-Xeon-SPs from the – nanometer production come with (at least ) up to 32 cores, i.e. only with four more than the previous Cascade Lake – (14 – nanometer) types (Xeon-SP Gen 2).

However, Intel has increased the computing power per clock with the Ice Lake computing cores and compared to the AMD Epyc 7002 “Rome” they have instead of just two AVX2 units per core AVX – 512 – arithmetic units. Compared to their predecessors, the Ice Lake Xeons also have two more RAM channels (8 instead of 6 for LGA 4189). In supercomputing applications such as NAMD STMV and LAMMPS for the simulation of molecular dynamics 32 Ice-Lake cores should therefore be converted to 20 Calculate percent faster than 64 AMD Rome cores. In the Monte Carlo simulation, Intel promises 30 percent advantage. However, AMD plans to introduce the Epyc “Milan” with Zen-3 technology for 2021.

Ice Lake Xeons finally bring Intel servers up to the current PCI Express status with PCIe 4.0.

Confusingly, Intel assigns the Ice Lake Xeons to the third Xeon SP generation too like the “Cooper Lake” processors presented in June from the 14 – nanometer Production. The Ice Lakes are primarily intended for servers with one or two processors (single / dual socket), the Cooper Lakes for servers with four or more CPU sockets.

Unlike the Cooper-Lake-Xeons, the Ice Lakes do not master the AI ​​data format BFloat 16 but a number of other new features like SGX2 and RAM encryption.

New supercomputers Trish Damkroger mentioned three for 2021 planned supercomputers with Ice Lake-SP: The Korea Meterological Administration is buying 50 – PFlops system for weather and climate calculations based on the current top 500 – List in the top – 10 would end up. The German Max Planck Computing & Data Facility (MPCDF) will commission the “Raven” with Nvidia A 100 and around 7 PFlops Oracle wants to use Ice Lake in its HPC cloud.

(ciw)