Using Knights Landing (KNL) manycore processors on ARCHER
ARCHER has recently added a small Cray XC40 cluster containing Intel's Knights Landing (KNL) processors. This system is intended to allow the UK computational simulation community to test their codes on the KNL processors, optimise codes for this new hardware, and evaluate the suitability of KNL for their applications. In this course we will introduce the KNL system associated with ARCHER, descibe how it can be used, and present the technical details of the KNL processor.
Details
Knights Landing is Intel's latest Xeon Phi many-core processor. It offers large amounts of floating point performance (the theoretical peak is 3TFlop/s using double precision data)
in a single processor for applications that can use it efficiently. The KNL hardware is significantly different to the previous generation of Xeon Phi, and contains specialised hardware
that may beneficial for scientific applications.
In this course we will describe the KNL hardware, explain how to use the various new features it presents, and explain how to access and use KNL processors through the ARCHER service.
There will be a number of hands-on practical sessions, and all attendees will be given KNL access for the duration of the course.
This course is free to all academics.
Intended learning outcomes
On completion of this course students should be able to:
- Understand the Knights Landing (KNL) processor.
- Understand how to access and run jobs on the ARCHER KNL cluster.
- Understand the impact of vectorisation on performance on KNL.
- Understand how to check if an application is vectorising and modify applications to improve vectorisation
- Use the different memory available in the nodes.
Pre-requisites
Some understanding of at least one of the following programming Languages:
- Fortran, C or C++.
Timetable
- 09:30 - 10:15 : Introduction to the KNL and the ARCHER KNL system
- 10:15 - 10:45 : Practical: Running on the ARCHER KNLs
- 10:45 - 11:15 : Break
- 11:15 - 12:00 : Memory modes programming
- 12:00 - 12:30 : Practical: Investigating Memory on the KNL
- 12:30 - 13:30 : Lunch
- 13:30 - 14:00 : Practical: Investigating Memory on the KNL
- 14:00 - 14:15 : Cluster modes
- 14:15 - 15:00 : Vectorisation
- 15:00 - 15:30 : Practical: Investigating vectorisation
- 15:30 - 16:00 : Break
- 16:00 - 17.00 : Practical: Continue vectorisation or play with your own code
Course Materials
Links to the Slides and exercise material for this course.
Location
The course will be held at EPCC University of Edinburgh
Registration
Please use the registration page to register for ARCHER courses.
Questions?
If you have any questions please contact the ARCHER Helpdesk.