Eadline: Challenges of Living with Multicore

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Over at Admin HPC, Douglas Eadline writes that the proliferation of manycore architectures continues to be a challenge for HPC programmers.

Recently, Intel introduced their Many Integrated Core (MIC) or Xeon Phi co-processor. Whereas the Phi lives on the PCI bus and brings more cores to the table, the design is somewhat different from a GP-GPU. The current Phi has 60 general-purpose x86 cores, each coupled with a vector processor. The Phi is not a co-processor like the GP-GPUs but rather a fully functional processing unit. In terms of software, the Phi can be programmed using standard OpenMP, OpenCL, and updated versions of Intel’s Fortran, C++, and math libraries – that is, the same tools used to program the x86 multicore processors. Data must still travel across the PCI bus, but the volume depends on how the Phi is used.

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