Just as Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) CEO Brian Krzanich opens the regular staff meetings before a dramatically reduced IDF2015 Shenzhen conference, it is a good time to review how government and enterprises don’t see eye to eye when it comes to strategic business.

China’s Tianhe-2 supercomputer is world’s fastest supercomputer, at 33 PFLOPS demonstrated and 55 PFLOPS theoretical performance.

Remember the Tianhe-2 machine at Guangzhou Supercomputer Center, the current World’s number one according to Top 500 Supercomputer list? Unlike some other China supercomputers – Tianhe-2 is fully Intel based machine,  the world’s largest assembly of Intel Xeon CPUs and Xeon Phi accelerators.

Even after Intel ‘opened the kimono’ and gave a nearly 70%  discount on its processors and accelerators, it has given Intel, and therefore US technology sector a major foothold in China and Asian region as such. Over the course of past two years, we were involved in a lot of discussions with Intel staff who were not privy to see the financial impact of the deal — and even argued our undoubtedly solid information. We’re not here to report how things should be, or are in marketing and investor presentations to its numerous staff, but how things really are.

During 2015, the Tianhe-2 supercomputer was supposed to be doubled in its size, up to 110 PFLOPs peak, again using the very same Intel processors and accelerators. Since now these are mature products with lower real manufacturing cost for Intel, they could finally make some real money.

Well, it was not to be: our tweety bird from the window chirped to us that Uncle Sam has put this supercomputer centre, together with National University of Defense Technology in Changsha, the system’s creators, and Tianjin centre, among others, on so a so-called “Denial List”, which prevents any high technology from the USA to be sold to these sites. Our sources used even harsher words.

Knowing that these several sites alone are expected to order some 250+ PFLOPS of compute in the next few years (around 500,000 top-end Broadwell-EP Xeon E5v4 processors, or  approximately $1 billion high margin list price) and they were THE Intel friendly ones, this is quite a loss to Intel, thanks to Uncle Sam.

But, what’s worse strategic loss in time is that, based on this decision as an excuse, indigenous China high end processor architectures can now push the government to gradually remove any dependence on US. This means just one thing: an AMD or Intel x86 processor technology is increasingly becoming errata non grata. Should the Chinese government react in force, it will give the Chinese vendors the blank check support to go all the way a developing their Alpha, POWER and MIPS processors for both the government and the mainstream commercial use.

You may think they are not up to the mark, but remember how fast British ARM architecture became the dominant processing architecture in the world. And this group doesn’t need to worry about the antiquated x86 ISA, worry about satisfying the dumbed down shareholder masses, or overpaying their marketing and sales staff, as well as the fat check, golden parachute-protected CxOs.

They have taken the best that the USA has developed (some of key Alpha, GPGPU and MIPS architects left US over the course of past four years, a lot of them due to non-renewed visas) and discarded due to corporate shenanigans, and the continued developing it much farther than anyone expected both on hardware and software side.

Five years ago, ShenWei showed a CPU that performed faster than the fastest GPUs of the time. Now, fifth generation is approaching, slotting between Tesla and FirePro GPGPUs and next-gen Xeon Phi accelerators. However, this is not an accelerator or a GPGPU – this is a CPU.

So, thanks to Uncle Sam, China might not have a 110 PFLOPS Intel based supercomputer but it definitely will launch a 100 PFLOPS system based on upcoming 64-core, TFLOPS-class ShenWei Alpha, with true blue CPUs possibly faster per socket then even the next generation Xeon Phi or Volta/Pascal-based Teslas.  Next, of course 100 PFLOPS Chinese POWER8 or 9 — (thank you IBM) and then possibly even Loongson MIPS – -it may come back into the high end field with renewed government support because of this Uncle Sam move. All are clean, elegant, scalable high end RISC architectures.

So who are the winners and losers from this?

NUDT and Tianhe may be the losers for now, but only short term. They will simply speed up their HPC ARM plan.

Intel comes out the big loser from this and a lot: who will want to do a phased deployment large x86 machine in China now, and worry about future phases? Then comes Uncle Sam himself: they lost even that little bit of influence on the high end China HPC. How is that for “cutting your nose to spite your face?”.

VR WORLD’s  Analysis: US government moves accelerate the Chinese CPU roadmap while curtailing juiciest sales for Intel and other US vendors.

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Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) has shed further details on its second-generation Xeon Phi CPU, known as Knights Landing.

The processor features several technical achievements, starting with a 14nm manufacturing process, which is a first in this series. Designed to offer high-performance computing, Knights Landing differs from other server-based CPUs in that it uses lots of low-energy cores to run parallel tasks, whereas offerings from IBM (NYSE:IBM) or Oracle (NYSE:ORCL) use fewer but more powerful cores.

Built on Intel’s MIC (Many Integrated Core) architecture with a total of 8 billion transistors, Knights Landing runs a modified version of the Atom Silvermont x86 core in a tile configuration, with a single tile featuring two cores and vector execution units along with shared L2 cache as well as a circuitry that connects the tile to the rest of the mesh network. Intel has mentioned that each Knights Landing package would include a processor with 30 or more tiles and eight on-chip memory modules. Another major highlight with Knights Landing is that it would be able to function as a host processor, meaning that it can boot and run x86 operating systems and application code without any need for recompilation. It can also act as a co-processor.

Talking about memory, the chip vendor has announced that Knights Landing would feature eight 2GB stacks of memory, totaling up to 16GB. The chip is manufactured at Micron, and looks to be a variant of the manufacturer’s Hybrid Memory Cube, which involves stacking memory and using an embedded logic chip to deliver higher bandwidth at a lower power. Micron has mentioned that its HMC modules will be able to transfer data 15 times faster than a standard DDR3 module, while utilizing 70% less energy. Along with on-chip memory, Knights Landing will come with six memory channels that can connect a total of 384GB DDR4 memory.

The result of the new manufacturing process, core design and memory is that Knights Landing will offer three times the performance as the current-gen Knights Corner, with Intel claiming 3 teraflops double-precision and 6 teraflops single-precision performance. That number is close to the 7 teraflops figure Nvidia (NASDAQ:INTC) touted during the launch of its latest video card, the Titan X.

It is no wonder, then, that Intel is aiming for the same use-cases as Nvidia for Knights Landing, with the chip vendor stating that the CPU can be used for deep learning and data analytics. Nvidia, however, has invested significant resources in its platform, and is offering tools such as the Digits software framework. Even if Intel does not manage to successfully challenge Nvidia in the Knights Landing, it is witnessing a great amount of demand, with over 50 companies set to sell server systems with the CPU as the host.

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So, remember when TACC (Texas Advanced Computing Center) built the Stampede supercomputer using VERY preferred pricing from Intel for using Intel Xeon Phi cards back in 2012? Well, that Stampede supercomputer in conjunction with the Lonestar Supercomputer at TACC are responsible for some pretty interesting research. The TACC at the University of Texas, Austin houses many supercomputers, but the two that were utilized for this project were the Stampede and Lonestar. The team of scientists from Houston’s Methodist Research Institute (HMRI) found that Alzheimer’s disease and cancer share a pathway in gene transcription, a fundamental process of cell production and growth. They published their findings in the December 2013’th issue of the open access journal Scientific Reports by the Nature Publishing Group.

The Stampede supercomputer, Image Credit: TACC

They used the Stampede and Lonestar supercomputers at TACC to analyze and compare data collected from thousands of genes in order to narrow their search for a common signaling pathway between the two diseases. The two systems are part of TACC’s Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, dubbed XSEDE, which is a single virtual system that scientists use to share computing resources and much more. The research was made possible thanks to a donation from the Ting Tsung and Wei Fong Chao Foundation which has donated tens of millions of dollars to education, health and environmental research. This includes the establishment of BRAIN center at the Houston Methodist Research Institute, which was involved with the discovery of this link between cancer and Alzheimer’s. The TT and WF Chao foundation were primarily funded by Ting Tsung Chao’s cration of Westlake Chemical [NYSE:WLK] which has revenues exceeding $3.8 billion annually and a market cap of nearly $9 billion. Family members of the Chao family are worth billions of dollars since Ting Tsung’s passing in 2008. Even so, the foundation continues to be funded by the family’s wealth and continues to do good for mankind. The research was also supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, which currently only has a $30 billion budget per year as part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The Lonestar supercomputer, Image Credit: TACC

Stephen Wong, a bioengineer and medical researcher at Houston’s Methodist Research Institute said that his study was able to find a new link between Alzheimer’s disease and glioblastoma multiform, the most aggressive form of brain cancer. He said, “This is the first time people have found that at the molecular mechanism level there are linkages between the two diseases.” 

These findings contrast a 2013 study of public health in Italy and a 2012 study of public health in Taiwan that showed an inverse association between Alzheimer’s disease with cancer, making those findings possibly less relevant. Wong said, “No one understands why this link is there, in a biological sense. And that’s the reason we did this study. I think we are among the first to study it this way. Once you identify the mechanism, the particular pathway, we can use that information to design a new therapeutic strategy.”

More about these groudbreaking scientific research can be found on the TACC’s website that has a much more detailed explanation of how their research methodology was assisted by the Stampede and Lonestar supercomputers at the TACC.

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