The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin today announced that they are building a new supercomputer, called Stampeded, in partnership with Dell and Intel. When Stampede is deployed in 2013, it will be the most powerful system in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) eXtreme Digital (XD) program.

Stampede will comprise several thousand Dell "Zeus" servers with each server having dual 8-core processors from the forthcoming Intel Xeon Processor E5 Family (formerly codenamed "Sandy Bridge-EP") and each server with 32 gigabytes of memory. This production system will offer almost 2 petaflops of peak performance, which is double the current top system in XD. However, the most interesting part of the new supercomputer will be Intel’s Many Integrated Core (MIC) co-processors codenamed “Knights Corner” that will provide an additional 8 petaflops of performance.

Intel introduced the MIC architecture few years back and it uses more than 50 x86 cores to process highly parallel workloads. By using highly parallel processors like a GPU, the MIC chip that will be based on 22nm process technology will allow Stampede supercomputer to increase performance by fourfold.

Additionally, Stampede will offer 128 next-generation NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs) for remote visualization, 16 Dell servers with 1 terabyte of shared memory and 2 GPUs each for large data analysis, and a high-performance Lustre file system for data-intensive computing. All components will be integrated with an InfiniBand FDR 56Gb/s network for extreme scalability.

Altogether, Stampede will have a peak performance of 10 petaflops, 272 terabytes (272,000 gigabytes) of total memory, and 14 petabytes (14 million gigabytes) of disk storage.

As part of the Stampede project, future generations of Intel MIC processors will be added when they become available, increasing Stampede's aggregate peak performance to at least 15 petaflops. Stampede also has potential for additional upgrades.

This will be the first real life test of Intel’s MIC architecture, and if it’s able to deliver this kind of performance boost over traditional x86 architecture, coming years in computing will be very interesting, as Intel aims to bring Many Integrated Core architecture to desktop and mobile chips in future.