Message boards :
Number crunching :
What about Intel's new Phi?
Message board moderation
Author | Message |
---|---|
Nick Send message Joined: 17 May 99 Posts: 96 Credit: 17,356,094 RAC: 0 |
I see Intel is releasing a new coprocessor that offers extremely high performance and what seems to be a very easy port. How will Seti support this in the coming new year? http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2012/11/12/intel-delivers-new-architecture-for-discovery-with-intel-xeon-phi-coprocessors |
Claggy Send message Joined: 5 Jul 99 Posts: 4654 Credit: 47,537,079 RAC: 4 |
I see Intel is releasing a new coprocessor that offers extremely high performance and what seems to be a very easy port. How will Seti support this in the coming new year? Ask at the Boinc Dev Forum, until Boinc supports it, Seti can't support it, Claggy |
Nick Send message Joined: 17 May 99 Posts: 96 Credit: 17,356,094 RAC: 0 |
Would you be so kind as to point me to the Boinc Dev Forum? |
Claggy Send message Joined: 5 Jul 99 Posts: 4654 Credit: 47,537,079 RAC: 4 |
Would you be so kind as to point me to the Boinc Dev Forum? http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/index.php You'll need to creat a new account to post, Best ask in this thread since it has no anwers: Xeon Phi (MIC): Will it crunch? For Further Info, there is a thread here too: Xeon Phi (aka Knights Corner, MIC) Claggy |
Nick Send message Joined: 17 May 99 Posts: 96 Credit: 17,356,094 RAC: 0 |
Thank you Claggy This link is from someone who has traditionally been not very favorable to Intel but this time he's about as optimistic as anyone can get: http://semiaccurate.com/2012/11/13/what-will-intel-xeon-phi-do-to-the-gpgpu-market/ |
Keith White Send message Joined: 29 May 99 Posts: 392 Credit: 13,035,233 RAC: 22 |
From what I read it's a cluster of roughly 60 Pentium (the original) class CPU cores but is devoid of the usual MMX, SSE and the new AVX instructions in favor of a specialized vector unit (512 bit SIMD design), all running at around 1GHz. In theory each core could do up to 4 threads but that's rarely occurs in reality due to other issues. The card itself is $2700 and peaks at 225 watts. It's only 2-2.5x faster than the top end Xeon CPU in highly parallelized tasks. "Life is just nature's way of keeping meat fresh." - The Doctor |
Nick Send message Joined: 17 May 99 Posts: 96 Credit: 17,356,094 RAC: 0 |
The card itself is $2700 and peaks at 225 watts. It's only 2-2.5x faster than the top end Xeon CPU in highly parallelized tasks. I believe it is over 1TeraFlop double precision. That's more than 2.5X a Xeon. |
ivan Send message Joined: 5 Mar 01 Posts: 783 Credit: 348,560,338 RAC: 223 |
I see Intel is releasing a new coprocessor that offers extremely high performance and what seems to be a very easy port. How will Seti support this in the coming new year? Ask me again when I get my hands on one. :-) Possibly before February if I made a good enough impression on our preferred HPC supplier last week... |
Keith White Send message Joined: 29 May 99 Posts: 392 Credit: 13,035,233 RAC: 22 |
The card itself is $2700 and peaks at 225 watts. It's only 2-2.5x faster than the top end Xeon CPU in highly parallelized tasks. The 2.5x is from Intel's own page on the Phi, comparing two E5-2687 (3.1GHz, 8 cores) to one Phi card (1GHz, 60 cores). (footnote 5). They did see some Monte Carlo simulations run at 10.75x faster comparing two E5-2670 (2.6GHz, 8 cores) to a Phi SE10P (1.1GHz, 61 cores). (footnote 9) The 1 TFlop DP is theoretical peak performance. "Life is just nature's way of keeping meat fresh." - The Doctor |
Raistmer Send message Joined: 16 Jun 01 Posts: 6325 Credit: 106,370,077 RAC: 121 |
If it will be programmable via OpenCL we can make use of it even w/o BOINC support as it was done already with early CUDA and early ATi Brook+/OpenCL support. SETI@home (at least in it's optimized part) usually goes ahead of BOINC "official" support. What we really need is hardware availability for test and free development tools for it. SETI apps news We're not gonna fight them. We're gonna transcend them. |
Nick Send message Joined: 17 May 99 Posts: 96 Credit: 17,356,094 RAC: 0 |
The 2.5x is from Intel's own page on the Phi, comparing two E5-2687 (3.1GHz, 8 cores) to one Phi card (1GHz, 60 cores). (footnote 5) Yes, you're right. That comparison is watt for watt. It would be 5X faster than a single 8 core Xeon but the power comparison seems more appropriate. |
HAL9000 Send message Joined: 11 Sep 99 Posts: 6534 Credit: 196,805,888 RAC: 57 |
If it will be programmable via OpenCL we can make use of it even w/o BOINC support as it was done already with early CUDA and early ATi Brook+/OpenCL support. I think standard x86 CPU supports OpenCL. So I would guess x86 based coprocessor cards would also. SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[ |
Mark Lybeck Send message Joined: 9 Aug 99 Posts: 245 Credit: 216,677,290 RAC: 173 |
The card itself is $2700 and peaks at 225 watts. It's only 2-2.5x faster than the top end Xeon CPU in highly parallelized tasks. Hello, You get almost One teraflop with one GTX 500 series (5xx) card at a fraction of the price. What is the business case here? |
Josef W. Segur Send message Joined: 30 Oct 99 Posts: 4504 Credit: 1,414,761 RAC: 0 |
... Double precision. For full-up supercomputers, that's an important consideration and the PHI 1 TFLOPS is a lot better than the direct competitor NVIDIA Tesla K10 at about 0.19 TFLOPS DP. For SETI@home which uses mostly single precision, and users who are willing to go with consumer grade GPUs, top GPUs from either AMD or NVIDIA are likely much better than PHI on a cost/performance basis. But it would be good if a system with PHI bought for other purposes could also be used for SETI crunching. As Raistmer said, it depends on Intel providing the OpenCL drivers and low/no cost development software. Hal is right that the high level OpenCL can be translated to x86, both AMD and Intel have drivers which do that for some range of their CPUs. But doing OpenCL on a Sandy Bridge chip is somewhat different than the same on 64 cores each with 512 bit SIMD but lacking some other refinements. Joe |
HAL9000 Send message Joined: 11 Sep 99 Posts: 6534 Credit: 196,805,888 RAC: 57 |
The card itself is $2700 and peaks at 225 watts. It's only 2-2.5x faster than the top end Xeon CPU in highly parallelized tasks. The number you are looking at on those cards is probably the SP(single precision) rating. Intel is stating TF for DP(double precision). Which generally is less than 1/4 of the SP rating. For instance a Radeon HD 6990 is rated 5099 GF running SP & 1276.88 GF running DP. SETI@Home application currently only use SP. So the SP performance is what you would want to compare. Currently that isn't really helpful across manufacturers yet. SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[ |
Keith White Send message Joined: 29 May 99 Posts: 392 Credit: 13,035,233 RAC: 22 |
... The Tesla K20 is 1.17 TFlop peak DP. Also a 225 watt card. The K20X is 1.31 TFlop peak DP at 235 watts. The K20X are used in the new #1 in the Top500 supercomputer list. The AMD S10000 is 1.48 TFlop peak DP at 375 watts. Everyone has a dog in the HPC hunt now. "Life is just nature's way of keeping meat fresh." - The Doctor |
Grant (SSSF) Send message Joined: 19 Aug 99 Posts: 13715 Credit: 208,696,464 RAC: 304 |
If it will be programmable via OpenCL we can make use of it even w/o BOINC support as it was done already with early CUDA and early ATi Brook+/OpenCL support. Keep in mind these are fully compatable x86 CPU cores. If the software runs on a Xeon system, it will run on a Phi card without any changes. Of course if you do work the code to take advantage of Phi then you'll get even greater improvements in performance than just by running it as is. Grant Darwin NT |
©2024 University of California
SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.