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The Xeon Phi family of co-processors was announced in June, but Intel finally disclosed additional details about the first shipping implementation of Larrabee. In this short article we'll go over the different Xeon Phi SKUs, what kind of software runs on it and how the Xeon Phi are implemented in a supercomputer.

We had the chance to briefly visit Stampede, the first Supercomputer based upon the Xeon Phi in Austin, TX. Stampede is the most powerful of the supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).

Today AMD unveiled its new Opteron 6300 series server processors, code name "Abu Dhabi". The Opteron 6300 contains the new Piledriver cores, an evolutionary improvement of the Bulldozer cores.

We talked about the long list of small improvements that were made in the "Piledriver" core. Just to recap, it has higher clockspeeds at the same TDP, a "smarter" L2 with more effective bandwidth, smarter prefetching, a perceptron branch predictor that supplements the primary BPU, a larger L1 TLB, schedulers that free up tokens more quickly, faster FP and integer dividers and SYSCALL/RET (kernel/System call instructions), and faster Store-to-Load forwarding. Finally, the new Opteron 6300 can now support one DDR3 DIMM per channel at 1866MHz. With 2 DIMMs per channel, you get a 1600MHz at 1.5V. We are still working with AMD to get you our independent real-world benchmarks, but until then we discuss the SKUs and AMD's own benchmarks.

Earlier this month I drove out to Oak Ridge, Tennessee to pay a visit to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). I'd never been to a national lab before, but my ORNL visit was for a very specific purpose: to witness the final installation of the Titan supercomputer.

ORNL is a US Department of Energy laboratory that's managed by UT-Battelle. Oak Ridge has a core competency in computational science, making it not only unique among all DoE labs but also making it perfect for a big supercomputer.

Titan is the latest supercomputer to be deployed at Oak Ridge, although it's technically a significant upgrade rather than a brand new installation. Jaguar, the supercomputer being upgraded, featured 18,688 compute nodes - each with a 12-core AMD Opteron CPU. Titan takes the Jaguar base, maintaining the same number of compute nodes, but moves to 16-core Opteron CPUs paired with an NVIDIA Kepler K20 GPU per node. The result is 18,688 CPUs and 18,688 GPUs, all networked together to make a supercomputer that should be capable of landing at or near the top of the TOP500 list.

Over the course of a day in Oak Ridge I got a look at everything from how Titan was built to the types of applications that are run on the supercomputer. Having seen a lot of impressive technology demonstrations over the years, I have to say that my experience at Oak Ridge with Titan is probably one of the best. Normally I cover compute as it applies to making things look cooler or faster on consumer devices. I may even dabble in talking about how better computers enable more efficient datacenters (though that's more Johan's beat). But it's very rare that I get to look at the application of computing to better understanding life, the world and universe around us. It's meaningful, impactful compute.

Read on for our inside look at the Titan supercomputer.