XSEDE offers free HPC Training from Cornell Virtual Workshop

Today Cornell University announced that four new Cornell Virtual Workshop training topics are available at the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) user portal. “The Cornell University Center for Advanced Computing (CAC) is a leader in the development and deployment of Web-based training programs designed to enhance the computational skills of researchers, broaden the participation of underrepresented groups in the sciences and engineering, and accelerate the adoption of new and emerging technologies.”

Intel Discontinues Xeon Phi 7200-Series Knights Landing Coprocessors

AnandTech reports that Intel is discontinuing it’s line of Knights Landing PCIe based Co-processors. The move is not a surprise given that the company has been producing bootable Xeon Phi processors since early in 2016. “At least for now, Intel does not want to compete against add-on PCIe compute accelerators with its Xeon Phi products. A big question is whether it actually needs to, given the stand-alone capabilities of Xeon Phi and its performance characteristics.”

Berkeley Lab Tunes NWChem for Intel Xeon Phi Processor

A team of researchers at Berkeley Lab, PNNL, and Intel are working hard to make sure that computational chemists are prepared to compute efficiently on next-generation exascale machines. Recently, they achieved a milestone, successfully adding thread-level parallelism on top of MPI-level parallelism in the planewave density functional theory method within the popular software suite NWChem. “Planewave codes are useful for solution chemistry and materials science; they allow us to look at the structure, coordination, reactions and thermodynamics of complex dynamical chemical processes in solutions and on surfaces.”

PRACE Posts Best Practice Guide for Intel Xeon Phi

The European PRACE initiative has published a new Best Practice Guide for Intel Xeon Phi, Knights Landing Edition. “This best practice guide provides information about Intel’s MIC architecture and programming models for the Intel Xeon Phi co-processor in order to enable programmers to achieve good performance of their applications. The guide covers a wide range of topics from the description of the hardware of the Intel Xeon Phi co-processor through information about the basic programming models as well as information about porting programs up to tools and strategies how to analyze and improve the performance of applications.”

Intel Xeon Phi Processor Programming in a Nutshell

In this special guest feature, James Reinders looks at Intel Xeon Phi processors from a programmer’s perspective. “How does a programmer think of Intel Xeon Phi processors? In this brief article, I will convey how I, as a programmer, think of them. In subsequent articles, I will dive a bit more into details of various programming modes, and techniques employed for some key applications. In this article, I will endeavor to not stray into deep details – but rather offer an approachable perspective on how to think about programming for Intel Xeon Phi processors.”

13.7 Petaflop MareNostrum 4 Supercomputer Coming to BSC

Today the Barcelona Supercomputing Center announced plans to MareNostrum 4, a 13.7 Petaflop supercomputer that will be 12.4 times more powerful than the current MareNostrum 3 system. In a contract valued at almost €30 million, IBM will integrate in one sole machine using its own technologies alongside those of Lenovo, Intel, and Fujitsu.

New AVX-512 Instructions Boost Performance on Intel Xeon Phi

While there have been previous generations of AVX instructions, the AVX-512 instructions can significantly assist the performance of HPC applications. “The new AVX-512 instructions have been designed with developers in mind. High level languages that are used for HPC applications, such as FORTRAN and C/C++, through a compiler will be able to use the new instructions. This can be accomplished through the use of pragmas to direct the compilers to generate the new instructions, or users can use libraries which are tuned to the new technology.”

A New Generation of Performance with Intel Xeon Phi

“With up to 72 out-of-order cores, the new Intel Xeon Phi processor delivers over 3 teraFLOPS (floating-point operations per second) of double-precision peak while providing 3.5 times higher performance per watt than the previous generation. As a bootable CPU with integrated architecture, the Intel Xeon Phi processor eliminates PCIe* bottlenecks, includes on-package high-bandwidth memory, and available integrated Intel Omni-Path fabric architecture to deliver fast, low-latency performance.”

Video: Intel Xeon Phi (KNL) Processor Overview

Adrian Jackson from EPCC at the University of Edinburgh presented this tutorial to ARCHER users. “We have been working for a number of years on porting computational simulation applications to the KNC, with varying successes. We were keen to test this new processor with its promise of 3x serial performance compared to the KNC and 5x memory bandwidth over normal processors (using the high-bandwidth, MCDRAM, memory attached to the chip).”

Trinity Supercomputer Wiring Reconfiguration Saves Millions

LANL reports that a moment of inspiration during a wiring diagram review has saved more than $2 million in material and labor costs for the Trinity supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory.