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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Intel's director of high performance computing has left the company [theregister.co.uk] after 27 years:

Reinders describes [hpcwire.com] how he joined Intel in 1989 to work on a VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) processor called iWarp, designed to be connected into a cluster. It was the early days of a search for higher computing performance via parallelism rather than faster clock rates.

According to Reinders, Intel's work on parallelism eased back when clock rates surged again with the 486 and Pentium processors, but that was only temporary. Reinders became a tireless champion for concurrency as well as for Intel's compilers, libraries and other software development tools.

Not everything went well. Intel's general-purpose GPU and accelerator project, codenamed Larrabee, never came to market. However parts of Larrabee were used in Intel's MIC (Many Integrated Core) concurrent processor, which became Xeon Phi, codenamed Knights Corner, fully released in 2012. China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer, the world's fastest according to the Top 500 list [top500.org], uses Xeon Phi accelerators.

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