Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC)

Intel Labs has created an experimental Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC), a research microprocessor containing the most Intel Architecture cores ever integrated on a silicon CPU chip - 48 cores. It incorporates technologies intended to scale multi-core processors to 100 cores and beyond, such as an on-chip network, advanced power management technologies and support for message-passing. The name Single-chip Cloud Computer reflects the fact that the architecture resembles a scalable cluster of computers such as you would find in a cloud, integrated into silicon. The research chip features:

• 24 tiles with two IA cores per tile
• A 24-router mesh network with 256 GB/s bisection bandwidth
• 4 integrated DDR3 memory controllers
• Hardware support for message-passing

Our group is one out of 7 German universities that host a SCC prototype for operating system and firmware research. Our project aims at the establishment of a reliable SMP Linux operating system on the SCC, in order to investigate the challenges for operating system and hypervisor with such a processor architecture.

Due to our work on the SCC, we are part of Intel's Many-core Applications Research Community.

Our group provides the following services to the SCC community:

• Gentoo image for the SCC system
• Virtual serial ports for communication between SCC Linux and the MCPC

Contact persons

• Researcher: Jan-Arne Sobania
• Principal investigator: Peter Tröger