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Best Xeon Phi x200 OS

Per_J_
New Contributor I
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Hi,

I have just got my Xeon Phi 7210 up and running with Ubuntu 16.04 HWE server, but I have a feeling that it is not the right choice.

I managed to run a job on 128 hyper threads, but 256 fails with insufficient cores.

My first attempt to run ubuntu desktop was not a success - it was running but annoing to work with.

Is there a prefered OS for perfomance and/or easy of use/setup? Should I only install a CLI version or is it possible to install a workstation version without degrading performance?

Best regards,

Per

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Sebastian_S_Intel
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The list of supported operating systems can be found in here in table 1.

The CentOS was intended for non-enterprise users. Please keep in mind that these distribution requires patches to achieve best performance.
The required patches can be obtained from Intel(R) Xeon Phi(tm) Software.

Regards

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Per_J_
New Contributor I
736 Views

Hi Sebastian,

Thanks, I'll reinstall with CentOS 7.3 and see if it helps :-)

Best regards,

Per

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Per_J_
New Contributor I
736 Views

Hi Sebastian,

When I install CentOS 7.3 it installs with netinstall the kernel that correspond to RHEL 7.4 - should I install the patches RHEL 7.4 patches or do I need to download a different image and hope that it doesn't update the kernel?

Best regards,

Per

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JJK
New Contributor III
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Hi Per,

as stated in another thread: source RPMs are included in xppsl-1.5.3-centos7.3.tar , allowing you to rebuild the kmod RPM (xppsl-1.5.3/centos7.3/srpms/kmod-xppsl-addons-1.5.3-4380.x86_64.rpm) for CentOS 7.4 ; the other RPMs are not tied to a specific kernel version.

If I read the release notes corectly, then the only reason to install the kmod RPM is to avoid some kernel oddities when running in SNC-4 topology.

HTH,

JJK

 

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Per_J_
New Contributor I
736 Views

Hi JJK,

Thanks, does it mean that it could run on any linux dist if it is not in SNC-4 mode?

Best regards,

Per

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JJK
New Contributor III
736 Views

I see no reason why not - but stability might be an issue; also, I've noticed that (older) Ubuntu releases do not support enough cores (some stop at 64 cores max).

The second problem with running anything other than SLES or RHEL/CentOS is that you will get zero point zero support from Intel (or me ;) )

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Per_J_
New Contributor I
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Hi JJK,

Stability is a big issue - I just tried to compile and run OpenFOAM on a combination of gcc 7.1 which gave some nasty errors, sometimes the calculations just diverged, so don't rock the boat :-D

I was thinking of a dual boot because OpenFOAM is easier to setup in ubuntu, but it seems to work with devtools-4 and Intel MPI on CentOS.

I will try to reinstall CentOS 7.4 when I find the best combination of compiler and mpi...

Best regards,

Per

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