At the 2021 International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) Intel is showcasing how the company is extending its lead in high performance computing (HPC) with a range of technology disclosures, partnerships and customer adoptions. Intel processors are the most widely deployed compute architecture in the world's supercomputers, enabling global medical discoveries and scientific breakthroughs. Intel is announcing advances in its Xeon processor for HPC and AI as well as innovations in memory, software, exascale-class storage, and networking technologies for a range of HPC use cases.

"To maximize HPC performance we must leverage all the computer resources and technology advancements available to us," said Trish Damkroger, vice president and general manager of High Performance Computing at Intel. "Intel is the driving force behind the industry's move toward exascale computing, and the advancements we're delivering with our CPUs, XPUs, oneAPI Toolkits, exascale-class DAOS storage, and high-speed networking are pushing us closer toward that realization."

Intel today launched its most advanced, highest performance data center platform optimized to power the industry's broadest range of workloads—from the cloud to the network to the intelligent edge. New 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code-named "Ice Lake") are the foundation of Intel's data center platform, enabling customers to capitalize on some of the most significant business opportunities today by leveraging the power of AI.

New 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors deliver a significant performance increase compared with the prior generation, with an average 46% improvement on popular data center workloads. The processors also add new and enhanced platform capabilities including Intel SGX for built-in security, and Intel Crypto Acceleration and Intel DL Boost for AI acceleration. These new capabilities, combined with Intel's broad portfolio of Intel Select Solutions and Intel Market Ready Solutions, enable customers to accelerate deployments across cloud, AI, enterprise, HPC, networking, security and edge applications.

BittWare, a Molex company, today unveiled the IA-840F, the company's first Intel Agilex -based FPGA card designed to deliver significant performance-per-watt improvements for next-generation data center, networking and edge compute workloads. Agilex FPGAs deliver up to 40% higher performance or up to 40% lower power, depending on application requirements. BittWare maximized I/O features using the Agilex chip's unique tiling architecture with dual QSFP-DDs (4× 100G), PCIe Gen4 x16, and three MCIO expansion ports for diverse applications. BittWare also announced support for Intel oneAPI, which enables an abstracted development flow for dramatically simplified code re-use across multiple architectures.

"Modern data center workloads are incredibly diverse, requiring customers to implement a mix of scalar, vector, matrix and spatial architectures," said Craig Petrie, vice president of marketing for BittWare. "The IA-840F ensures that customers can quickly and easily exploit the advanced features of the Intel Agilex FPGA. For those customers who prefer to develop FPGA applications at an abstracted level, we are including support for oneAPI. This new unified software programming environment allows customers to program the Agilex FPGA from a single code base with native high-level language performance across architectures."

Intel and Argonne National Laboratory are collaborating on the co-design and validation of exascale-class applications using graphics processing units (GPUs) based on Intel Xe-HP microarchitecture and Intel oneAPI toolkits. Developers at Argonne are tapping into Intel's latest programming environments for heterogeneous computing to ensure scientific applications are ready for the scale and architecture of the Aurora supercomputer at deployment.

"Our close collaboration with Argonne is enabling us to make tremendous progress on Aurora, as we seek to bring exascale leadership to the United States. Providing developers early access to hardware and software environments will help us jumpstart the path toward exascale so that researchers can quickly start taking advantage of the system's massive computational resources." -Trish Damkroger, Intel vice president and general manager of High Performance Computing.

Intel today announced key milestones in its multiyear journey to deliver a mix of architectures with a unified software experience. The company announced the gold release of Intel oneAPI toolkits coming in December, and new capabilities in its software stack as part of the Intel's combined hardware and software design approach. Intel also debuted its first discrete graphics processing unit (GPU) for the data center, Intel Server GPU, based on the Xe-LP microarchitecture and designed specifically for high-density, low-latency Android cloud gaming and media streaming.

"Today is a key moment in our ambitious oneAPI and XPU journey. With the gold release of our oneAPI toolkits, we have extended the developer experience from familiar CPU programming libraries and tools to include our vector-matrix-spatial architectures. We are also launching our first data center GPU based on Xe-LP microarchitecture focused on the fast-growing cloud gaming and media streaming segments," said Raja Koduri, Intel senior vice president, chief architect and general manager of Architecture, Graphics and Software.

Intel and Heidelberg University Computing Center (URZ) today announced that they have established oneAPI Academic Center of Excellence (CoE) at UZR. The newly established CoE has a goal to further develop Intel's oneAPI standard and enable it to work on AMD GPUs. This information is a bit shocking, however, Intel believes that the technology should work on a wide range of processors, no matter the vendor. The heterogeneous hardware programming is the main goal here. In a Twitter thread, an Intel employee specifies that Intel has also been working with Arm and NVIDIA to bring Data-Parallel C++ (DPC++), a core of oneAPI, to those vendors as well. That should bring this universal programming model to every device and adapt to every platform, which is a goal of heterogeneous programming - whatever you need to program a CPU, GPU, or some other ASIC, it is covered by a single API, specifically oneAPI.

UZRURZ's work as a oneAPI CoE will add advanced DPC++ capabilities into hipSYCL, which supports systems based on AMD GPUs, NVIDIA GPUs, and CPUs. New DPC++ extensions are part of the SYCL 2020 provisional specification that brings features such as unified shared memory to hipSYCL and the platforms it supports - furthering the promise of oneAPI application support across system architectures and vendors.

The Swedish e-Science Research Center (SeRC) announced that it has extended its support of the oneAPI initiative as Intel's first oneAPI academic center of excellence (COE). Hosted at Stockholm University and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, the center will use oneAPI's unified and heterogeneous programming model to accelerate research conducted with GROMACS, a widely-used free and open-source application designed for molecular dynamics simulation.

As a oneAPI COE, SeRC will work closely with Intel engineers on oneAPI performance optimizations across CPUs and GPUs used to investigate scenarios that would be extremely difficult to replicate in a traditional lab. This work will allow researchers using GROMACS to take full advantage of upcoming exascale machines powered by oneAPI to deliver unprecedented visibility into the molecular mechanisms of life.

At Supercomputing 2019, Intel unveiled its vision for extending its leadership in the convergence of high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) with new additions to its data-centric silicon portfolio and an ambitious new software initiative that represents a paradigm shift from today's single-architecture, single-vendor programming models.

Addressing the increasing use of heterogeneous architectures in high-performance computing, Intel expanded on its existing technology portfolio to move, store and process data more effectively by announcing a new category of discrete general-purpose GPUs optimized for AI and HPC convergence. Intel also launched the oneAPI industry initiative to deliver a unified and simplified programming model for application development across heterogenous processing architectures, including CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and other accelerators. The launch of oneAPI represents millions of Intel engineering hours in software development and marks a game-changing evolution from today's limiting, proprietary programming approaches to an open standards-based model for cross-architecture developer engagement and innovation.