Intel throws in the towel on the processors that killed the first Aurora supercomputer — Knights Mill and Knights Landing support removed from LLVM

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Larrabee is gone forever?

Aurora
(Image credit: Argonne National Laboratory)

What once was considered the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the Aurora supercomputer is now being forgotten. Intel has removed support for its Xeon Phi Knights Mill and Knights Landing accelerators from the LLVM/Clang 19 compiler, which essentially means the end of support for any kind of the MIC architecture once meant to power the Exascale-class Aurora supercomputer, reports Phoronix.

The Knights Mill processors faced numerous delays and reportedly didn't meet performance targets, ultimately resulting in the cancellation of the first revision of the Aurora supercomputer after several years of delays. The DoE later changed the design of Aurora to employ Intel's Sapphire Rapids and Ponte Vecchio compute GPUs and faced yet more delays and performance issues primarily due to problems with Intel's Sapphire Rapids CPUs and Ponte Vecchio compute GPUs. These hardware issues, along with cooling system malfunctions and other stability problems, still prevent Aurora from achieving its full potential. However, the system is now on track for full deployment sometime this year, a whopping nine years since Aurora was first announced. 

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Anton Shilov
Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

1 Comment Comment from the forums
  • bit_user
    The headline said:
    Intel throws in the towel ...
    Makes it sound like this is a recent decision. They already discontinued that product line by like 2018 and only kept software support around to fulfill support obligations for existing customers. The warranty terms on most of their datacenter products seem to be 5 years, which would put this withdrawl of support pretty much right on time (since you could still buy Xeon Phi for a while after they announced EOL).

    In case anyone forgot, the discontinuation of Xeon Phi marked their pivot to more classical GPU-like architectures for HPC (i.e. Ponte Vecchio):
    https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/discrete-gpus/data-center-gpu/max-series.html
    The main problem with those is how absurdly ambitious they were, as if Intel was intent on taking the lead within a single generation. However, in the time it took them to ship it in volume, their competitors got at least 2 generations out the door and Intel ended up having to cancel Ponte Vecchio's immediate successor. Then, with Falcon Shores, they appear to be seriously backtracking on complexity, not unlike how Emerald Rapids is far simpler (at the die/packaging level) than Sapphire Rapids (which also faced massive delays).

    Anyway, I digress... I do appreciate what Intel has done with oneAPI (which I've used on my humble iGPU) and I hope they stay in the GPU compute game. IMO, it was already clear that x86 couldn't directly compete with dGPUs like 10 years ago, but that's what Xeon Phi was trying to do.
    Reply