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Test-driving Intel Xeon Phi

Jianbin Fang, Henk Sips, Lilun Zhang, Chuanfu Xu, Yonggang Che, Ana Lucia Varbanescu
TU Delft, the Netherlands
5th ACM/SPEC international conference on Performance engineering (ICPE’14), 2014

@inproceedings{fang2014test,

   title={Test-driving Intel Xeon Phi},

   author={Fang, Jianbin and Sips, Henk and Zhang, LiLun and Xu, Chuanfu and Che, Yonggang and Varbanescu, Ana Lucia},

   booktitle={Proceedings of the 5th ACM/SPEC international conference on Performance engineering},

   pages={137–148},

   year={2014},

   organization={ACM}

}

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Based on Intel’s Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture, Intel Xeon Phi is one of the few truly many-core CPUs – featuring around 60 fairly powerful cores, two levels of caches, and graphic memory, all interconnected by a very fast ring. Given its promised ease-of-use and high performance, we took Xeon Phi out for a test drive. In this paper, we present this experience at two different levels: (1) the microbenchmark level, where we stress "each nut and bolt" of Phi in the lab, and (2) the application level, where we study Phi’s performance response in a real-life environment. At the microbenchmarking level, we show the high performance of five components of the architecture, focusing on their maximum achieved performance and the prerequisites to achieve it. Next, we choose a medical imaging application (Leukocyte Tracking) as a case study. We observed that it is rather easy to get functional code and start benchmarking, but the first performance numbers can be far from satisfying. Our experience indicates that a simple data structure and massive parallelism are critical for Xeon Phi to perform well. When compiler-driven parallelization and/or vectorization fails, programming Xeon Phi for performance can become very challenging.
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