Two questions about Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor before deciding to buy one

[Tommy_Y_T__HU]

Hi, all. Our lab plans to buy an Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor to speed up. However, I still have two important questions in mind (not quite sure of) before buying it

1. Is Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor supported for Windows system?

I wonder this because from "Intel® Xeon Phi™ Coprocessor Developer's Quick Start Guide", it says "Host - The Intel® Xeon® platform containing the Intel® Xeon Phi™ Coprocessor installed in a PCIe* slot. The operating systems (OS) supported on the host are Red Hat* Enterprise Linux* 6.0, Red Hat* Enterprise Linux* 6.1, Red Hat* Enterprise Linux* 6.2, Red Hat* Enterprise Linux* 6.3, SUSE* Linux* Enterprise Server SLES 11 SP1 and SUSE* Linux* Enterprise Server SLES 11 SP2. The user will have to install the OS.". Seems it only supports Linux system. However, most of our work are done on Windows.

2. How fast speed can be given by Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor? How much modification need to be done to change original code to be running well on Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor (using Intel Parallel Studio XE 2013)?

From Breakthrough Performance section, it says it can only can up to 10x (even below this for different situations). How much modification need to be done to change original code to be running well on Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor (using Intel Parallel Studio XE 2013) in order to achieve such performance (10x)? And what further do I need to do if I want to achieve higher performance (change code to parallelism)?

Hope you guys can give me more details on them. Thanks in advance. :)

[TimP]

http://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/topic/337513 gives about as much detail as has been announced about future plans for Windows. Publicized top500 results http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4401017/Xeon-Phi-lands-in-seven-Top-500-supercomputers are among the highest speedups achieved with available libraries. Such comparisons are made with vector-parallel code running on both host and co-processor (as are the stock options pricing comparisons to which you refer). The stock pricing benchmarks rely on specific instruction-level support for single precision transcendental math functions.

[Tommy_Y_T__HU]

Hi, Tim. Many thanks for your reply. From your suggested http://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/topic/337513, it says "Support for Windows will be available in 2013" by Belinda. Do you know when exactly is it?

[Frances_R_Intel]

If you haven't read "An Overview of Programming for Intel® Xeon® processors and Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessors" (http://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/article/330164/an-overview-of-programming-for-intel-xeon-processors-and-intel-xeon-phi-coprocessors_1.pdf or you can get to it from a link on the main page) you might want to look at that. It should give you some idea of how to estimate the benefits and level of effort involved in porting your code over.

[TaylorIoTKidd]

Re: '"Support for Windows will be available in 2013" by Belinda. Do you know when exactly is it?' Unfortunately, we cannot provide you with more than that. If you are an NDA customer and have an Intel account manager, you may be able to get more information from them.

[Tommy_Y_T__HU]

Thanks Frances, now I get basic idea about level of effort involved in porting my code over Intel® Xeon Phi by reading the file you suggested. And thanks Taylor, too. I will keep track of availability of Intel® Xeon Phi for Windows and buy after that.

[BelindaLiviero]

One more clarification about Windows support: when we talk about introducing Windows support, we mean this to be on the Intel Xeon(r) host housing the Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor. On the coprocessor itself, you'd continue to run the Intel supported version of the MIC platform software stack (e.g. linux); that doesn't mean that it won't be possible to run a different operating system on the coprocessor (it's just that the configuration supported by Intel will be what it ships...)

[Tommy_Y_T__HU]

Thank Belinda for this clarification. This is just what I mean. I don't care much about which system the Phi coprocessor itself running on as long as it can be installed to a Windows PC. :)

[Kathy_F_Intel]

Tommy - more info is now available.

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/windows-early-enabling-for-intelr-xeon-phitm-coprocessor#caveats

[Tommy_Y_T__HU]

Hi Kathy, many thanks for this useful info. :)

kathy-farrel (Intel) wrote:

Tommy - more info is now available.

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/windows-early-enabling-for-intelr-xeon-phitm-coprocessor#caveats