[Beowulf] bring back 2012?

[Kilian Cavalotti]

On Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 7:10 AM, Prentice Bisbal <pbisbal at pppl.gov> wrote:
> When Intel first started marketing the Xeon Phi, they emphasized that you
> wouldn't need to rewrite your code to use the Xeon Phi. This was a marketing
> moving to differentiate the Xeon Phi from the NVIDIA CUDA processors. That
> may have been a true statement, but it didn't mention anything about
> performance of that existing code, and was, frankly, very misleading. The
> truth is, if you don't rewrite your code, you're not going to see much
> (relatively speaking) of a performance improvement, and when you do rewrite
> your code to optimize it for the Xeon Phi, you'll also see amazing speed ups
> on regular Xeon processors.

> I've seen several presentations where speed ups of 5x, 10x, etc., on regular
> Xeons just through optimizing the code to be more thread- and vector-
> friendly. Some improvements were so significant, they make you ask if the
> Xeon Phi was even needed. [...]

> If you pay attention to Intel's marketing and the industry news the past
> couple of years, you will have noticed that Intel has been promoting "code
> modernization" efforts, saying all codes need to be modernized to take
> advantage newer processors, while that is certainly true, "code
> modernization" is just a euphemism for "rewrite your code". This is Intel
> backpedaling on their earlier statements that you don't need to rewrite your
> code to take advantage of a Xeon Phi, without actually admitting it.

Can't agree more, very well described.

Cheers,
-- 
Kilian