[petsc-dev] A closer look at the Xeon Phi

[Jed Brown]

On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 6:06 PM, Tim Tautges <tautges at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

> I'm kind of surprised at the > 10k element crossover myself.  For the
> strong scaling cases, at high core counts, that's not terribly far from the
> number of DOFS per processor, is it?  I guess CPUs will be slower than the
> Xeon in most cases (BGx), or fewer (Titan), but still.
>

Which crossover are you referring to? The CPU versus GTX285 at about 20k
dofs, but with only very small gains for another order of magnitude?

For 2D Laplace, we expect to see strong scaling peter out around a couple
thousand dofs per core. It can go a little further on Blue Gene because the
network is much faster and the cores are a bit slower.

Titan has a lot of (premium price) GPUs that you have to use to utilize the
machine well, but it's unclear whether the architecture is delivering a
science/dollars advantage, even if you ignore development costs to port and
re-tune codes and the environment costs (it's more complicated to build and
run, so it takes people longer to get running). I think the main
justification is speculation about what future hardware will look like, not
cost-effectiveness today.
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