More than a decade ago, Intel ran into an issue when trying to deliver what was to be the world's top-ranked supercomputer: it looked like its new Pentium Pro processors at the heart of the system might not arrive in time.
As a result, the chip maker made an unusual move by paying HP $100,000 to evaluate building the system using its PA-RISC processors, said Paul Prince, now Dell's chief technology officer for enterprise products, but then Intel's system architect for the supercomputer. Called ASCI Red and housed at Sandia National Laboratories, it was designed to be the first supercomputer to cross the threshold of a trillion math calculations per second.
Intel ultimately met that 1-teraflop performance deadline using its own chips, HP dropped its PA-RISC line in favour of Intel's Itanium processor line, and the Pentium Pro paved the way for the company's present powerhouse status in the server market.
However, the supercomputing division within Intel was phased out. ASCI Red was its last job, Prince said in an interview on the eve of the Intel Developer Forum.
The division had enough independence that it could have used another company's chips, but doubtless eyebrows would have been raised had a rival processor design showed up in such a high-profile machine, which ultimately used more than 9,000 processors.
And it was not the only hurdle Intel overcame in the design and construction of ASCI Red, which used ordinary processors but plenty of one-off technology, including a customised operating system and Intel's own router chips to send data through the system.
The first version of the router chip had a data integrity problem and Intel did not have time to fully validate a fixed version, although the engineers knew what caused the problem, Prince said. In a presentation titled "Statistics for the Common Man", Prince convinced Intel's management that a variety of worst-case scenario tests could reduce the validation time from more than a dozen weeks to about four to six. He prevailed.
"It worked and they didn't fire me," Prince said. ASCI Red, developed for the US Energy Department's Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative to simulate nuclear weapons physics in a computer rather than with real-world tests, led the Top500 list of supercomputers from June 1997 until November 2000, when IBM's ASCI White took the top spot.
Meanwhile, in today's world...
Prince is now focused on the best directions for getting Dell servers, storage and networking gear into customers' hands. And although he's comfortable with nitty-gritty chip details, he said customers these days are gravitating toward higher-level discussions.
"At this point, nobody's keeping up with the GHz rating of chips," he said, no doubt to the delight of Intel and AMD, which both ran into physical limits on clock…
