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Building a Xeon Phi Rig

M

Minotaar

Weaksauce
Joined
Mar 21, 2004
Messages
97
I am planning on building a rig to host one or more Xeon Phis. I've built systems for myself for quite some time, but the Phi of course is new. I'm also not seeing any discussion about it in the enthusiast/consumer space - not that it's exactly something you would expect. By any chance, has anyone here built such a system, and were there any unexpected quirks with it? I'm especially curious about power and cooling issues - I find it hard to believe that 60 x86 cores can be adequately cooled in the dual slot chassis they provide, downclocked or not.
 
I'm planning to parallelize my own research code on it; I'm not running anyone else's code.
 
It's analysis code for the comparison of protein structures. A significant part of the analysis involves processing molecular surfaces, which are highly curved high-genus surfaces. Imagine something like swiss cheese, except not cylindrical on the outside. I need to be able to determine if many many points in space are either inside or outside that surface, and the associated calculations are complex, but also rather parallel. GPU systems are inappropriate for that effort, because they lack high quality concurrent hash tables - something I need for general processing - so the x86 platform on the Phi might be quite a bit of help there. Who knows if it will be - I'm just going to drop the cash for one system to see how it is, and then scale up if I can actually squeeze performance out of it.
 
Yup, very cool. A Phi is essentially the same as your bare metal host equivalent, test on your Haswell/Ivy/Sandy box then calculate your parallelism from there if it works out.
 
That much I've done already. I'm ready to see it in real life. Have you built a phi? I will be hitting local memory pretty hard so I imagine there are mem bus limits. It would be good to connect to someone that has some experience there.
 
There are both passive and actively-cooled SKUs. I would expect that the actively-cooled SKUs would be more appropriate for a tower/workstation, as the passive ones would require forced airflow in a rack chassis. I believe that the various flavors of the Phi are 250-300w TDP.

Supermicro has a few different barebones configurations that are recommended for the Phi, depending on your needs. At this point, the only Phi options are recommended Xeon E5 systems. I haven't heard of anyone getting it to work in a motherboard that hasn't been explicitly recommended, but would be very interested in one of that were the case- I have a few E5 systems, and have a real need for something like this as well (financial analytics).

I have only seen dual E5 configs that support the Phi, presumably because it requires some serious PCIe bandwidth, and you'd need the extra lanes from the second E5.

Also, get your hands on Intel Parallel Studio XE if you haven't already.
 
Phis only run in certain motherboard with certain CPUs remember. You will have to make sure both the motherboard and CPU support the Phi.
 
Spazturtle said:
Phis only run in certain motherboard with certain CPUs remember. You will have to make sure both the motherboard and CPU support the Phi.
Click to expand...

This is exactly what I've heard. Does anyone know where I can find such a list?

I saw the Asus logo on the intel site regarding OEMs that make PHI-compatible parts. So I'm still hoping I can build one myself instead of buying some overpriced shitbox from Dell. I suppose that is a philosophical point, but I'm sure others here agree.
 
Supermicro has several complete systems listed, I'd imagine they sell the board as well.

Be sure and let us know what you end up with and how it performs against your bare metal processor testing.
 
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