Speaker
Sebastiano Schifano
(U)
Description
An interesting evolution in scientific computing is represented by the
streamline introduction of co-processor boards that were originally built to
accelerate graphics rendering and that are now being used to perform
general computing tasks. A peculiarity of these boards (GPGPU, or
General Purpose Graphic Processing Units, and many-core boards like
the Intel Xeon Phi) is that they normally ship on the one hand with a
limited amount of on-board memory and, on the other hand, with several
tens or even several thousands of processing cores. These facts
normally require specific considerations when writing or adapting
software so that it can efficiently run on them. In addition,
programmability of these boards is often multi-faceted and needs to be
carefully evaluated as well.
An INFN project called Computing on Knights and Kepler Architectures,
involving several INFN sites and collaborations, has been set up to
investigate the suitability of these boards for scientific computation
in a range of physics-related fields. The hardware targets for these
investigations are the recently released x86-based Intel Xeon Phi and
the K20-based NVIDIA GPGPU Tesla boards.
We present the results of the investigations performed by this project
using production samples of these boards. In particular, we will show
adaptability, portability considerations, configuration tips and
performance analysis for Xeon Phi and K20 cards applied to real use
cases linked to the processing of data produced by experimental
physics and to problems typical of theoretical physics, in single and
multiple Phi and GPGPU configurations. We will also provide several
micro benchmarks related to basic operations like memory copy and use
of vector extensions.
Primary authors
Davide Salomoni
(Universita e INFN (IT))
Francesco Giacomini
(INFN CNAF)
Gaetano Maron
(Universita e INFN (IT))
Marcello Pivanti
(Universita di Ferrara (IT))
Marco Caberletti
(INFN)
Matteo Manzali
(INFN)
Raffaele Tripiccione
(INFN)
Sebastiano Schifano
(U)
