Knight's Landing + Java

[Ma_L_1]

Dear Intel Staff,

I just got to know some details of your great presentation of Knight's Landing (KNL) at Hot Chips this year. Information about KNL on the website is still sparse. From your slides I understand that there will be a version of KNL that is socked and can be used as a primary CPU in a rack. However, this raises quite some questions that I cannot find satisfying answers.

Our scenario:
We have a research cluster that consists mostly of 2 socket systems with normal Ivy-Bridge Xeon CPUs. Our main application is a JVM based machine learning system that uses the MKL via JNI to accelerate computations. We intend to extend this cluster soon and would like to utilize Phi processors. But whether we can use them depends on a few things. (see below)

What I would like to know from you:

1. Is KNL (socketed) a fully featured x86_64 CPU? For me that means:
   1. Can we run an off the shelf Linux on it? (e.g. Redhat Server, Ubuntu Server, etc.?)
   2. Can we run an off the shelf JVM on it? (e.g. Oracle x64 JVM)
   3. Are there any hardware restrictions that make native code invocation via JNI  difficult/impossible?
   4. Are there any restrictions for invoking MKL on matrices that reside in the main memory? (i.e. data is not stored in the MCDRAM, but in the DDR4 memory. On Knight's Corner this was terribly inefficient for small matrices because of the offloading-overhead for shipping the data back and forth.)
   5. Will normal multi-threading via pThreads or the Java-Multithreading-Framework work? Will all (logical/physical) cores be accessible this way?
2. Will there be (cheaper?) versions with less than 16 GB MCDRAM?
3. What is the expected price range for KNL?
4. When will KNL become available?

Many thanks in advance,

Matt

[Frances_R_Intel]

I don't have any answers to the last three questions. In fact the only one I have a good answer for is 1.a. You can run a standard Linux release provided your kernel is recent enough. No support for AVX512, no KNL. For information on the patch supporting AVX512, see: http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_3.15. As far as your questions on Java support, Intel has announced that KNL is binary compatible with Intel Xeon processors. So run it - probably - but what you need to know is when it will be optimized and I haven't a clue.