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Two shiny new Intel Xeon Phi 5110P co-processors have recently arrived at EPCC.

Based on Intel's Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture, each card comprises 60 cores with 4-way SMT and a 512 bit wide SIMD vector unit.  At a clock speed of 1.053 GHz, this gives an aggregate peak double precision floating point performance of 1.01 TFLOP/s - all in a PCI card package, and using less than 225 Watts of power.  

The vast majority of applications running on HECToR today are designed around the Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) parallel programming paradigm. Each processing element (PE), i.e. MPI rank or Fortran Coarray image, runs the same program and performs the same operations in parallel on the same or a similar amount of data. Usually these application are launched on the compute nodes homogenously, with the same number of processes spawned on each node and each with the same number of threads (if required).

It's the last session of the EASC conference and we still have 80-90 people in attendence, which is fantastic. We're all very pleased that over 130 people came and contributed to this event, it's great to see the demand for a discussion forum for Exascale research and issues.

Keep your eye on the EASC2013 website (http://www.easc2013.org.uk), because we will shortly be putting up the slides from the keynotes, which we've also been filming and will put online (providing the videos are of sufficient quality).

Day 2 of the EASC2013 conference in Edinburgh.

There has been a series of interesting and diverse talks today, with parallel sessions covering topics such as tools for exascale, preparing applications for exascale and the I/O challenges. Disruptive technologies has been a theme in many talks and discussions, a theme started yesterday with Iain Duff's talk on disruptive technologies within the EESI-2 project.