[LA-SiGMA] Special HPC Event: Accelerating Production with Xeon Phi Coprocessors on LSU SuperMIC Cluster

[Feng Chen]

Special HPC Event:
Accelerating Production with Xeon Phi Coprocessors on
LSU SuperMIC Cluster

Introduction

*      Do you want to produce your scientific results in a shorter wall-clock time on supercomputers?

*      Do you want to obtain more results per unit time to increase your research productivity?

*      Do you want to speed up your research progress?

*      Do you want to prepare yourself for the next generation supercomputing and learn about parallel computing with coprocessors?

The LSU HPC User Service team will hold a special event entitled Accelerating Production at 9 am Oct 14th, 2015 in the Frey 307 classroom. The purpose of this event is twofold: to raise the computational research community's awareness of the benefit of leveraging Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors in their research and to engender collaboration between research groups and HPC user consultants by working together on porting their codes to coprocessors. All interested students, professors and researchers at LSU are invited to this special event.

In this event, we do not intend to present technical details on how to write and optimize programs for the Xeon Phi architecture, which will be covered in our regular weekly training. Instead, we will first walk you through some successful examples in a variety of disciplines to show the promising achievement to accelerate applications. For the rest of the session, we will have one-to-one discussions with you on how we can help you to accelerate your application. We strongly encourage you to bring the programs you run day-to-day on HPC clusters to this event so that we can work together to speed up your programs on Xeon Phi.

Schedule

Time


Topic


9:00 - 9:30


Introduction


9:30 - 11:00


One-to-one discussions on how to use applications accelerated with Xeon Phi on SuperMIC


Who can benefit from using Xeon Phi?

In the following, we identify a few scenarios where you as a user can probably benefit immediately by starting to use the Xeon Phi coprocessors, along with examples of them on SuperMIC. For the programs tested by us, no matter which scenario they belong to, the speedup attained ranges from a few tens of percent to more than 10 times, compared to the original implementation running on CPUs only.

Scenario 1: you are running a third-party code that has been optimized for Xeon Phi

Many widely-used applications have already been optimized for Xeon Phi by their developers. Please refer to a full list provided by Intel at here<http://tci.taborcommunications.com/l/21812/2015-02-11/6m5mp>.

Scenario 2: you are running a code written by yourself

If you do not run one of the Xeon-Phi enabled applications mentioned above, but a custom code written by yourself or your group members, it is still very likely that it can be accelerated on Xeon Phi. First of all, if the Intel MKL library is applied in your codes, it is straightforward to auto-offload MKL portions to Xeon Phi by adding compiling flags. If OpenMP or hybrid MPI-OpenMP parallel schemes are utilized in your codes, the OpenMP blocks can be offloaded to Xeon Phi with minor modification of the source codes. If your code is written in pure MPI, it can still be accelerated by the so-called symmetric processing.

Scenario 3: you are running a third-party code that has not been optimized for Xeon Phi

If you use open-source third-party codes or embed them within your own code instead, it may still be possible to modify the source codes to make it run on Xeon Phi and get better performance. The same techniques mentioned in scenario 2 can be applied here as well.

Final remarks

Our intent is to help you make use of the Xeon-Phi coprocessors on SuperMIC and to speed up your research. Continued code-porting assistance from the HPC User Services team will be provided if needed. If you choose to utilize Xeon Phi coprocessors, you get the added bonus of spending fewer allocation Service Units (SUs) to complete a given same job. And if you document usage of Xeon Phi in your proposal application for an allocation on SuperMIC, your proposal will be more likely to be considered favorably. We believe that the effort to migrate your codes from CPU to Xeon Phi is worthy. Finally, we welcome all interested LSU researchers to this special HPC event.

Please visit our announcement page: http://www.hpc.lsu.edu/training/accprod.php for more details and register using this link: http://www.hpc.lsu.edu/training/tutorials.php.

Please distribute to faculty, staff and students that might be interested.

Thanks,

LSU HPC User Services Group
Feng Chen, Ph.D (Civil Engineering)
Shaohao Chen, Ph.D (Physics)
Wei Feinstein, Ph.D (Biology)
Xiaoxu Guan, Ph.D (Physics)
Jim Lupo, Ph.D (Astrophysics)
Le Yan, Ph.D (Chemical Engineering)



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