Hacker News Reader

Comment by Scaevolus | Hacker News Reader

Xeon Phi coprocessors are flops competitive with GPUs and are used in many supercomputers.

Embedded FPGA accelerators are of interest primarily to large server farms and cloud operators, where the cost of development for FPGA acceleration is cheaper than the savings of acceleration-- Microsoft in particular has done a lot of work in this area (for Bing), and probably worked with Intel to define the CPU.

View on HN

Pretty sure that Phi as you know it is largely being left. Argonne's Aurora exascale machine was suppose to be Xeon Phi, but it has been postponed till 2021 and will likely use some other tech. Also look at the top 500 list from late 2017. Trinity the NNSA computer at #7 is Phi based but only gets about 50% of theoretical peak.

My personal tinfoil hat take is that Xeon Phi was made to make China waste top dollar on their supercomputers going with a less useful accelerator made by a US company.

Once China figured that out, the way they'd implement not falling for the same trick twice is simply never using US tech again. Which would limit other opportunities.

It's also at least plausible that they'd probably have people trained to think like Americans who might think of the same thing in advance.

By wasting millions of dollar and literally gave the Phi for free to China, which is part of the Intel CPU deal?

The answer is rather simple. Xeon Phi wasn't as good as the GPU counterpart.

Not if you believe Tom Forsyth

http://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BWhy%20d...

Yes US government has forbidden the export of Xeon and Xeon Phi to China's supercomputing centers. It prompted the construction of Sunway TaihuLight, which uses Chinese own CPUs.

Phi is dead. The next NERSC computer is GPUs. Not sure what Argonne is doing but there’s no reason to think it won’t be GPUs. The only reason Phi/KNL made sense was because it seemed like a conservative choice when GPUs were more exotic, which may have been okay if Intel didn’t have the crazy yield problems they had. FPGAs don’t make sense because the conservative choice at this point is GPU. I don’t think any of the leading compute facilities have the stomach for a new technology like this, especially from intel.

Cmon it wasn't just yield problems. Premise that you can just recompile CPU code and it would run quickly on Phi was false.

It's a pity. Intel does have a compiler that works great for Xeon Phi: ISPC. Alas, it seems Intel was never serious about ISPC.

> The next NERSC computer is GPUs.

Got a source on this? I've not seen an official mention of what sort of architecture NERSC-9 will be.

> Not sure what Argonne is doing but there’s no reason to think it won’t be GPUs.

It will be a future Intel processor [1].

[1] https://www.hpcwire.com/2017/09/27/us-coalesces-plans-first-...

Nothing I can link to, but that information has been shared to DOE labs and projects relying on large NERSC allocations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com