[Beowulf] Intel kills Knights Hill, Xeon Phi line "being revised"

Tue Nov 21 10:03:01 PST 2017

As someone who works in a government funded research lab (as do many other list members, I suspect), there’s a lot of other factors that go into the seemingly bizarre funding and development stuff.  Here’s a partial list  - not specific to this instance, but just in general.

1)      The “name” sponsor isn’t always the one actually interested in the final product – money gets shuffled around via Interagency Authorizations and funding vehicles.  Typically a given lab will have a “prime contract” or “master contract” with one government agency (NASA in the case of JPL, where I am). All the work you do is on task orders under that master contract.  If someone else (e.g. DoD, DHS, DoE) wants something done by JPL, they IA or MIPR money to NASA, who sends it to JPL.

2)      There is a desire to keep competencies at various centers – in order to be an intelligent consumer, it helps to have built one – I venture to say that folks who are on this list (almost all of whom have at least tried to build a cluster) are better at buying a cluster from someone else.

3)      Political considerations – The senator from the great state of Ruritania takes pride in having the worlds fastest computer and jobs for all those STEM grad students connecting patch cords in his/her state.

4)      Workforce retention – Building the worlds fastest computer is interesting work – for technical people, the single factor that keeps them in their job, and not jumping elsewhere (assuming they’re paid some reasonable amount) is “I get to do interesting work”.   You may be HPC’ing for half your time, and doing lethally boring contract monitoring (watching Other People do interesting work) the other half of your time.  You don’t leap out of bed in the morning saying, I hope that monthly financial statement has arrived so I can review it.

Jim Lux
(818)354-2075 (office)
(818)395-2714 (cell)

From: Beowulf [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] On Behalf Of C Bergström
Sent: Saturday, November 18, 2017 4:59 AM
To: Scott Atchley <e.scott.atchley at gmail.com>
Cc: Beowulf Mailing List <beowulf at beowulf.org>
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Intel kills Knights Hill, Xeon Phi line "being revised"

Actually, the better question is, which vendor received funds and actually made a useful solution that can go production with the deliverables. From my view it seems like history is repeating itself[1] and I wish more people would wake up. The top down approach to funding scientific research and the in-fighting between labs is just too much nonsense. If these research projects were a start-up, it would have failed hard.

 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X87

On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 8:50 PM, Scott Atchley <e.scott.atchley at gmail.com<mailto:e.scott.atchley at gmail.com>> wrote:
Hmm, can you name a large processor vendor who has not accepted US government research funding in the last five years? See DOE's FastForward, FastForward2, DesignForward, DesignForward2, and now PathForward.

On Fri, Nov 17, 2017 at 9:18 PM, Jonathan Engwall <engwalljonathanthereal at gmail.com<mailto:engwalljonathanthereal at gmail.com>> wrote:
Maybe they felt married to government sponsorship while the competition has found a way to compete with itself.
http://www.nag.co.za/2017/10/26/amd-launches-ryzen-processor-with-radeon-vega-graphics-for-notebooks/
Maybe such a huge contract even looks too good to be true.

On Thu, Nov 16, 2017 at 3:06 AM, Mikhail Kuzminsky <kus at free.net<mailto:kus at free.net>> wrote:

Unfortunately I did not find the english version, but Andreas

Essentially yes Xeon Phi is not continued, but a new design called Xeon-H is coming.
Yes, and Xeon-H has close to KNL codename - Knights Cove. May be some important (for HPC) microarchitecture features will remain.
But in any case stop of Xeon Phi give pluses for new NEC SX-Aurora.

Mikhail Kuzminsky

Zelinsky Institute
of Organic Chemistry
Moscow

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