NEW DELHI, INDIA: Aiming at the growing market of supercomputers, chip major Intel Corp announced on Monday its plans for a new class of many-core processors.

While making this announcement at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC), Intel said the new products based on the Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture would create platforms running at trillions of calculations per second, while also retaining the benefits of standard Intel processors. The new processor is codenamed Knights Corner.

Targeting high-performance computing segments such as exploration, scientific research and financial or climate simulation, Knights Corner will be made on Intel’s 22-nanometer manufacturing (nm) process – using transistor structures as small as 22 billionths of a meter – and will use Moore’s Law to scale to more than 50 Intel processing cores on a single chip, said Intel.

While the vast majority of workloads will still run best on Intel Xeon processors, Intel MIC architecture will help accelerate select highly parallel applications, it added. Intel said its MIC architecture is derived from several Intel projects, including “Larrabee” and such Intel Labs research projects as the Single-chip Cloud Computer.

“The CERN openlab team was able to migrate a complex C++ parallel benchmark to the Intel MIC software development platform in just a few days,” said Sverre Jarp, CTO of CERN openlab. “The familiar hardware programming model allowed us to get the software running much faster than expected.”

According to Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Data Centre Group, “Intel’s Xeon processors and now our new Intel Many Integrated Core architecture products will further push the boundaries of science and discovery as Intel accelerates solutions to some of humanity’s most challenging problems.”

He said the MIC architecture would extend Intel’s leading HPC products and solutions that are already in nearly 82 per cent of the world’s top supercomputers.