The other half of the equation
Again, Knights Ferry is only a development platform for the time being. However, an accelerator board called Knights Corner will eventually be released with more than 50 cores on a 22nm manufacturing process. We weren't given an exact shipping date, but considering the company's current timelines, we were told that it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect to see it sometime in early 2012.
Of course, hardware is only one half of the equation, and the software is where Intel thinks that it has a leg up over the likes of AMD and NVIDIA. Highly parallel architectures are very difficult to efficiently program for, especially for scientists and researchers who aren't necessarily experts at coding. The solution is the combination of Parallel Studio and Cluster Studio. These software products will make it easier to optimise applications to work faster and more efficiently by removing bottlenecks and making the most out the hardware available. The compilers will also be able to automatically balance the workload between high speed multi-core CPUs and slower MIC cores that excel at massively parallel tasks.
Basically, this makes the programming experience easier and more efficient, which in turn leads to programs that run faster. The compilers mean that you can write a single set of source code with one or two extra calls and have the compiler automatically optimise it for a many-core, multi-core, or hybrid environment. In the end, this makes scientists into better programmers, makes applications run faster and lets the researchers get on with the business of research more quickly.
Again, HPC is incredibly important to scientific and industrial research, especially in the UK, and seems to be constantly growing as more institutions realise the potential that it holds. For its part, Intel is bringing the tools and the hardware to scientists that will make the work that they do quicker and easier, freeing them to take their research even further.
