The 64-bit Intel® Itanium™ architecture is designed for high-performance scientific and enterprise computing, and the Itanium processor is its first silicon implementation. Features such as extensive arithmetic support, predication, speculation, and explicit parallelism can be used to provide a sound infrastructure for supercomputing. A large number of high-performance computer companies are offering Itanium™-based systems, some capable of peak performance exceeding 50 GFLOPS. In this paper we give an overview of the most relevant architectural features and provide illustrations of how these features are used in both low-level and high-level support for scientific and engineering computing, including transcendental functions and linear algebra kernels.

This paper gives a technical discussion of the Intel Pentium® Pro processor and optimization strategies used to achieve high performance on scientific applications. We demonstrate these optimizations by characterizing matrix multiplication (DGEMM). We give insight and a model into our efforts on obtaining the world's first TeraFLOP MP LINPACK run (on the Intel ASCI Option Red Supercomputer), based on Pentium Pro processor technology. The importance of this paper is carried by the increasing trend of commodity parts in the supercomputing arena.