[Beowulf] Intel Phi musings

[Dr Stuart Midgley]

It was simple really.  Within 1hr, I had recompiled a large amount of our codes to run on the phi's and then ssh'ed to the Phi and ran them… Saw that a single phi was faster than our current 4 socket AMD 6276 (64 cores) and then ordered machines with 2 phi's in them :)

I didn't bother with any of the compiler directives etc… just treated them like a 240core (hyper threaded) computer… and saw great scaling.


--
Dr Stuart Midgley
sdm900 at sdm900.com




On 12/02/2013, at 11:12 PM, Richard Walsh <rbwcnslt at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> Hey Stuart,
> 
> I am interested in what sold you on the Phi.  My cursory look
> suggested that using the Phi in Intel's offload mode (which 
> preserves the scalar performance) was not much easier to
> program than writing in CUDA ... and that using the Phi as
> a standalone processor while a programming convenience
> suffers on scalar code.  Even that programming convenience
> is limited by the fact that you have to think both in terms of
> vectors and threads.
> 
> Also, the speed ups I have seen generally seem modest,
> understanding that GPU performance hype is exaggerated.
> 
> Hearing what you like would be interesting.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> 
> Richard Walsh
> Thrashing River Consulting
> 
> On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 10:02 AM, Dr Stuart Midgley <sdm900 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've started a blog to document the process I'm going through to get our Phi's going.
> 
>     http://phi-musings.blogspot.com.au
> 
> Its very sparse at the moment, but will get filled in a lot over the next day or so… I've finally got them booting.
> 
> FYI we currently have 100 co-processors and should have the next 160 or so in a few weeks.
> 
> 
> --
> Dr Stuart Midgley
> sdm900 at sdm900.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
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