Single-chip Cloud Computer

The Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC ) is an experimental processor design that has emerged in research facilities of the company Intel. As part of the Tera -scale Research Program of Intel hardware and software approaches are being studied that are based on a very large number of computing units. The first generation of processors of this initiative was the 80 -core Intel Polaris. The second generation, the SCC (Code Name: Rock Creek ) dar.

The processor is comprised of 24 units, which are connected by means of a grid-like network and can communicate with one another above. Each of these units consists among other things of two P54C processor cores, each of which have over 16 kiB L1 instruction cache, 16 kiB L2 data cache and 256 kiB L2 cache.

The difference to conventional processors with multiple cores is that the programmer can exert great influence on the communication between the processors. In previous multi-core processors, the connecting medium between the processor cores was exclusively for the transport and synchronization of memory contents. When the SCC processor network can be used to processes that are running on the processor cores can communicate directly with each other without taking the external memory to help. SCC is thus similar in principle rather a cluster on a single chip as a multi-core processor in the usual sense.

Intel 2010 for the " Single-chip Cloud Computer " with the Innovation Prize for Climate and Environment ( IKU ) in the category "Environmentally Friendly Technologies" excellent because with the aid of data centers of the future can be made energy efficient.