Intel Xeon Phi 7110P anyone have

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JJ91284

Gawd
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Mar 28, 2007
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I bought an opened Intel Xeon Phi that had a little ding in the cover for a pretty good price recently. Lets just say it was a very expensive purchase (impulse buy) that my tax return and then some went to. Anyone have any experience setting one of these up.

I have zero experience with Linux and it appears this card doesn't run on windows with no driver support. So my first step here is to install Ubuntu 12.10 (64 bit) on a I5 3570k 16gb ddr3 and 128gb ssd, which appears to be a decent build. I figure it might be kind of interesting to see how well this may fold.

Specs of Card

Brand Intel
Model SC7110P
Type Server
Chipset Manufacturer Intel
Coprocessor Xeon Phi
Coprocessor Series 7110P
Max# of Cores 61
Memory Size 16GB
Memory Type GDDR5
Clock Speed 1.25 GHz

Peak Double Precision 1220 GFLOPS
Error Correcting Code (ECC) memory support Yes
Type Server
Interface PCI-E 2.0 x16
Overclocked No
APIs Supported DirectX 11
Low Profile No
Cooling Type Passive/Heatsink
Power Consumption 300W


 
Last edited:
It runs in windows. Intel released the windows SDK a couple of months ago.

EDIT: My mistake, that's just a general OpenCL driver for their CPUs, phi isn't listed. So looks like linux it is.
 
Last edited:
Quisarious said:
It runs in windows. Intel released the windows SDK a couple of months ago.
Click to expand...

I didn't see anything online about this when I was reading on Intel's site about this card. Thanks for the input here, I'll be looking into this.
 
I'd probably recommend using Centos 6 series (the latest is probably decent starting point) as Intel
seems to only support RedHat/SuSE distributions.

Generally, there are two approaches (that I can see) wrt folding performance evaluation:
(a) using FahCore_17 (ideally as-is) with OpenCL provided by Phi SDK
(b) building GROMACS -> OpenMM -> OpenCL stack and testing WUs "manually" (outside folding
   infrastructure)
 
tear said:
I'd probably recommend using Centos 6 series (the latest is probably decent starting point) as Intel
seems to only support RedHat/SuSE distributions.

Generally, there are two approaches (that I can see) wrt folding performance evaluation:
(a) using FahCore_17 (ideally as-is) with OpenCL provided by Phi SDK
(b) building GROMACS -> OpenMM -> OpenCL stack and testing WUs "manually" (outside folding
   infrastructure)
Click to expand...

Yep, looks like Centos is the best bet for now. I'm downloading Centos 6.3 and version 6.4 now. I'll probably start with Centos 6.3 as that's what looks to be supported now.

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-manycore-platform-software-stack-mpss
 
FahCore_17 on linux should work straight away, hop over to #fah on freenode.net to get setup with core 17 internal beta on linux.

All you have to do is get the Xeon Phi set up as a OpenCL device and FahCore_17 will run on it.

Though the GROMACS core is 4 times faster then the OpenCL core, but you won't get GROMACS working without some dicking around and some emulation/enumeration.
 
Wow awesome!! I'd like to know also the process how to link this badboy to work with FAH. I have 7110 and 7120 here.

900x900px-LL-63a9cb0a_Screenshot.png
 
At the moment, there's no way to use a Phi for FAH. Intel's OpenCL driver does not play nice with openMM at the moment (what the new GPU core, Core_17, utilizes). Intel and FAH have work to do to fix this. At some point it will happen (the motivation for FAH is not the Phi per se, but adding Intel support, particularly future iGPUs, which will also add support for Phi), but this is probably on the not-so-soon end of 'soon'.

In terms of SMP support, it's not possible to fold natively on the Phi now, and probably never will be. Gromacs is looking into asymmetric offload using the Phi (there's a task group working on it: http://www.gromacs.org/Project_ideas), but Gromacs won't be implementing this anytime soon, and then there is always the delay between Gromacs release and FAH implementation.
 
Yeah that's what I thought also, but if Xeon Phi supports FAH later on this badboy is going to wipe a 4way setup I think?
 
dhenzjhen said:
Yeah that's what I thought also, but if Xeon Phi supports FAH later on this badboy is going to wipe a 4way setup I think?
Click to expand...

There are two possible Phi usage scenarios:

1: As an OpenCL device. In this setting the PPD will likely be the range of top end GPUs (really hard to predict, but based on relative performance of functioning OpenCL programs on Phi and Intel CPUs, and comparing CPU performance to GPUs on the original FAHBench).

2: Asymmetric offload would have the Phi acting as a co-processor, where certain calculations amenable to the Phi's wide vector unit are offloaded, with 'easy' calculations being done on the CPUs FPU. In this setting, the speedup would be incremental on top of an existing system.
 
dhenzjhen said:
Awesome useful infos, thanks! :)
Click to expand...

What motherboard and CPU are you using? As far as I can tell, I've tried my Intel 7110P on a new MSI Z77A-G45 motherboard and a 3570k and my board wont boot up. I've tried it on my brother Asus Rampage socket 2011 and numerous other socket 1155 motherboards. It looks like I'm going to have to go with a supermicro server board, or I've just found these past few days Asus has a socket 1155 workstation board and also a socket 2011 workstation motherboard that works with other intel Phi's which I'm hoping mine works with.

Asus socket 1155 MB
https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P8Z77_WS/

Asus socket 2011
https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Z9PED8_WS/

http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P9X79_WS/
 
Officially phi requires a xeon. I don't know if that's actually true or not. Also, the MB has to support 64-bit PCIe addressing, most consumer boards do not. The boards you listed all support it, but you still may need a xeon to drive it.
 
JJ91284 said:
What motherboard and CPU are you using? As far as I can tell, I've tried my Intel 7110P on a new MSI Z77A-G45 motherboard and a 3570k and my board wont boot up. I've tried it on my brother Asus Rampage socket 2011 and numerous other socket 1155 motherboards. It looks like I'm going to have to go with a supermicro server board, or I've just found these past few days Asus has a socket 1155 workstation board and also a socket 2011 workstation motherboard that works with other intel Phi's which I'm hoping mine works with.

Asus socket 1155 MB
https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P8Z77_WS/

Asus socket 2011
https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Z9PED8_WS/

http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P9X79_WS/
Click to expand...


You can also use Supermicro's X9DRG-QF motherboard; it has been validated for Intel Xeon Phi and also NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C600/X9DRG-QF.cfm
 
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