Xeon Phi Hackaton

Hello everyone,

As announced last year, we are organising a hackaton for you. The hackaton will take place on May 20th (a Saturday) at Optiver's office. Further details and instructions will be provided after you sign up for this event. Of course we hope to see you all.

The idea is to have a go at the current generation Xeon Phi's. We have a Xeon Phi model 7250 (previously "Knights Landing" or KNL), with 68 cores clocked at 1.4 GHz, 96 GB of DDR4 RAM, and 16 GB Multi Channel Dynamic Random Access Memory (MCDRAM). With 4 hardware threads per core, this system can run with a total of 272 hardware threads.

https://secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/1/3/d/0/600_460505072.jpeg

What is especially interesting about this one is that it supports x86_64 directly and therefore you can use it directly from the Host OS. It will be seen as a "regular" CPU with a lot of cores. Older generations of the Xeon Phi ran as coprocessors and booted their own "(micro) Linux OS". It's unclear (to me) if the coprocessor version is still going to be released for this and future editions of the Xeon Phi. The future generation (Knights Mill) Xeon Phi to be released probably this year, should have even more performance improvements, for example in the area of Deep Learning.

As it's not every day you can experiment with this technology we thought it would be fun to organize a one-day Hackaton where you can come up with your own project for the device. Maybe you can come up with something upfront, on the day itself when we do a quick brainstorm before we start, or if not: we will do our best to prepare one (or more) exercises to hopefully give you a nice introduction into the device. So all skill-levels are therefore welcome.

Any help is greatly appreciated! If you happen to have some knowledge about the Xeon Phi and you like to help/mentor people that would be great. Because I suspect there will be many questions during the Hackaton and it would be a pity if we cannot answer all.

Thanks to

Alexander Kristenko for the idea and help!

https://secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/1/3/4/6/600_460564934.jpeg

Optiver for Hosting us and arranging food/drinks!

https://secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/1/1/5/f/600_460564447.jpeg

Bright Computing for lending us their Xeon Phi.

Hans Klabbers for organizing it!

Schedule - Saturday May 20th

The (provisional) agenda for the day will be:

08:30 Welcome participants (coffee/tea, no breakfast)
09:00 Plenary start
09:10 Presentation, introducing Xeon Phi, dev setup and coding assignments
10:15 Coffee break
10:45 Teams start coding
12:30 Lunch break
13:15 Continue coding
15:00 Coffee break
15:30 Continue coding
17:30 Dinner (pizza)
18:30 Continue coding
19:30 Team presentations
20:30 Wrap up

More info - 14th of May Update

We are almost done preparing the server now where we try to pre-install all the

Intel tools (https://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-parallel-studio-xe/details)

and some "Hello world" examples, so you can just ssh to it and start hacking! The list of Intel components (see previous link) could inspire an idea for the Hackaton... but we won't force anyone to use this stuff if you prefer for example gcc over the Intel compiler, or another programming language even, so that should all be okay. For getting the best possible performance out of the device the Intel tools probably can best optimize for the Xeon Phi though :) (For example in the case of gcc some pragmas for the Xeon Phi might be missing!)

In order to not get in each others way we have installed Slurm which allows multiple users/teams to run their programs in a queue.

And finally if there is anything you are specifically looking forward to working with let us know by replying to this message, we can pre-install it on the server (or do that during the Hackaton).