Thursday Oct 16, 2008
Larrabee
by Nola Donato & Stephen H Hunt

Larrabee is a many-core visual computing architecture that greatly increases flexibility and programmability compared to standard GPUs. It uses multiple in-order x86 CPU cores augmented by a wide vector processor unit to provide dramatically higher performance per watt and per unit of area than out-of-order CPUs on highly parallel workloads. A coherent on-die 2nd level cache allows efficient inter-processor communication and high bandwidth local data access by CPU cores.

Task scheduling is performed entirely with software in Larrabee, rather than in fixed function logic. The customizable software graphics rendering pipeline for this architecture uses binning in order to reduce required memory bandwidth, minimize lock contention, and increase opportunities for parallelism relative to standard GPUs. The Larrabee native programming model supports a variety of highly parallel applications that use irregular data structures. Performance analysis on those applications demonstrates Larrabee’s potential for a broad range of parallel computation.

Nola is a graphics architect at Intel working on the Larrabee project. She has worked on graphics since she was a graduate student in the Electronic Visualization Lab at University of Illinois where her research was used as the basis for a game console. Nola has worked on graphics software for top selling applications like Microsoft PowerPoint and Adobe Creative Suite. She has also designed game engines and tools for Sun, Mattel, Bally, 3DO and Silicon Graphics. Nola first became interested in parallel graphics as a researcher in the Intel Microprocessor Graphics Lab where she led a team which developed a scene manager for a distributed cluster. Now she is looking at how to keep many Larrabees really busy.

Steve is principal engineer at Intel currently working on the Larabee System Architecture. He graduated from University of Pennsylvania BSEE 1982 and joined Intel working on the 8051 microcontroller product development team, and held a variety of roles, mostly as a design engineer uC51 core plus cells custom ASIC, CAD tool developer (logic simulation, synthesis, DFT) micro-architect (Pentium, Pentium II), and researcher in computer human interface, large scale displays, advanced workloads, and parallel/throughput computing architectures. Recently, he led the micro-architecture and logic design of enterprise server chip and began work on Larabee in 2006 where is responsible for the system architecture, global features, and has been heavily involved in mapping out the future Larabee product roadmap.

Silicon Valley ACM SIGGRAPH Professional Chapter Events are open to the public.

Times:
7:30pm, Doors open, drinks, snacks
8:00pm, Feature presentation - "Larrabee "

Location:
"Garage II", building 4, Apple R&D Campus
4 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA, 95014

Directions:

View Larger Map

Coming from San Jose:

1. Take 280 North to De Anza Blvd.
2. Turn left on to 'De Anza', heading south.
3. Take the first left on to 'Mariani'.
4. Turn left on 'Infinite Loop'.
5. Look for building 4 ( it has a giant 6 foot tall number four in front of it ).
6. Enter the main lobby doors, go up the stairs to your far left to find Garage II.

Coming from San Francisco:

1. Take 280 South to De Anza Blvd.
2. Turn right on to 'De Anza', heading south.
3. Take the first left on to 'Mariani'.
4. Turn left on 'Infinite Loop'.
5. Look for building 4 ( it has a giant 6 foot tall number four in front of it ).
6. Enter the main lobby doors, go up the stairs to your far left to find Garage II.

Membership Info and Entrance:

We are now accepting memberships for 2008. Membership applications are available at our meetings. Membership dues are $20 per calendar year (January 1- December 31). Membership applications which are submitted after August 1 will include the remaining months of the current year for free.

SV SIGGRAPH holds meetings at least one Thursday every month. Meetings are not usually held in December or in the summer.

$5 donation per meeting for non-members.
Free for Silicon Valley ACM SIGGRAPH members
Free for full-time students (with valid ID).