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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Support
Forum: BOINC Agent Support
Thread: question: Xeon PHI cards and WCG |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 32
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Sgt.Joe
Ace Cruncher USA Joined: Jul 4, 2006 Post Count: 7848 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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es, totally agree that essentially no one will use these for crunching on WCG and my interest is out of pure curiousity. The "What if? What will it do?" kind of thinking. I hope you can get a test unit and see what it can do. Some of the rest of us are curious too. Cheers
Sgt. Joe
*Minnesota Crunchers* |
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SuperMecha
Cruncher Joined: Apr 25, 2011 Post Count: 12 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Except the PHI card can run all WCG projects and the 7970 and all GPUs will be useless on WCG in 2 or 3 months. Xeon Phi doesn't fully support x86 therefore it's unlikely that it would be able to run other WCG projects. http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2012/7/1...ks-amd64-conventions.aspx |
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Movieman
Veteran Cruncher Joined: Sep 9, 2006 Post Count: 1042 Status: Offline |
Except the PHI card can run all WCG projects and the 7970 and all GPUs will be useless on WCG in 2 or 3 months. Xeon Phi doesn't fully support x86 therefore it's unlikely that it would be able to run other WCG projects. http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2012/7/1...ks-amd64-conventions.aspx I don't know, my gut tells me it will needed to be ported over to run WCG on something very close to what we see now with GPU..Again, thats just a gut feeling. I'm a hardware guy and know very little about software.  |
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Movieman
Veteran Cruncher Joined: Sep 9, 2006 Post Count: 1042 Status: Offline |
Funny and not at the same time: Tonight on facebook Francois Piednoel from Intel joined in a thread I was in. The thread was about cars but I figured to take the opportunity and ask him about the Xeon PHI card so I posted replying to the car part but also asking if this card would work with BOINC "out of the box"...
----------------------------------------Now he replied to the car part but not a word about the card. I've learned over the years that especially from Intel but not limited to them that they only respond when they can spout positives on a topic.. So I read his non answer as actually being a "No, it won't"... BUT still working to get my hands on one because I like to see for myself.  |
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twilyth
Master Cruncher US Joined: Mar 30, 2007 Post Count: 2130 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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I don't know if you looked at my links, but the first post I made in the hardware thread said
----------------------------------------It won't be fully x86 compatible. On page 657f in the "Knights Corner Instruction Set Reference Manual" which can be downloaded via a link in this forum post aimed at developers, Intel details which registers and instructions are not supported in the Knights Corner architecture. This includes any instructions operating on MMX, XMM and YMM registers, more or less all of the instruction set extensions introduced over the course of the last 17 years – namely MMX, any iteration of SSE and AVX. This includes most specialize floating point operations apparently. So anything that will run on these cards will require a recompile at the very least it seems.  Anyway, here is the latest article I've seen comparing the top offerings from Intel, AMD and nVidia.   [Edit 1 times, last edit by twilyth at Dec 8, 2012 5:15:26 AM] |
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BladeD
Ace Cruncher USA Joined: Nov 17, 2004 Post Count: 28976 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Funny and not at the same time: Tonight on facebook Francois Piednoel from Intel joined in a thread I was in. The thread was about cars but I figured to take the opportunity and ask him about the Xeon PHI card so I posted replying to the car part but also asking if this card would work with BOINC "out of the box"... Now he replied to the car part but not a word about the card. I've learned over the years that especially from Intel but not limited to them that they only respond when they can spout positives on a topic.. So I read his non answer as actually being a "No, it won't"... BUT still working to get my hands on one because I like to see for myself. And who won't want a new toy to play with...for Xmas!  |
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Movieman
Veteran Cruncher Joined: Sep 9, 2006 Post Count: 1042 Status: Offline |
I don't know if you looked at my links, but the first post I made in the hardware thread said It won't be fully x86 compatible. On page 657f in the "Knights Corner Instruction Set Reference Manual" which can be downloaded via a link in this forum post aimed at developers, Intel details which registers and instructions are not supported in the Knights Corner architecture. This includes any instructions operating on MMX, XMM and YMM registers, more or less all of the instruction set extensions introduced over the course of the last 17 years – namely MMX, any iteration of SSE and AVX. This includes most specialize floating point operations apparently. So anything that will run on these cards will require a recompile at the very least it seems. Anyway, here is the latest article I've seen comparing the top offerings from Intel, AMD and nVidia. Yes, read the articles and it's not that I doubt you as I don't. It's just my curiousity that drives me. Oh, and this is sort of a private thing, Mj12 has paid me over $2900.00 so far and more coming in January.. I wasn't lieing to you way back then and it's important to me that you know that. |
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twilyth
Master Cruncher US Joined: Mar 30, 2007 Post Count: 2130 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Uhhh, OK. Well done?
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
If it runs Windows 32/64 and understands OpenCL, you will be the man... but, since WCG has to maintain separate builds for ATI and NVidia, there would have to be one for the Phi [kicking the open door], and chances that coming with 1 on the grid asking for work... But, there's the other hurdle to take too... BOINC must be coded to recognize a Phi as co-processor, so you'd have to talk to Dr. David Anderson. The rule is, without exception, no Dr.A consent, no BOINC change. [so much for open source, but then anyone is free to take the BOINC source code from the repository and start coding themselves. Once upon a time some capable folk did and came up with http://code.google.com/p/synecdoche/ but it stranded. One of the coders, a former CA, build an alternate preferences interface which was so much smarter [I've tested it]. Sadly, some things just end up like this http://www.garlikov.com/philosophy/Sisyphus.html (become a CA and you might see a fraction ;P
P.S. I doubt the Intel guy even knew what BOINC was, so he may have been embarrassed on that point ;) |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Come to think off it, would it not be great if Intel would include BOINC on the accompanying CD to test their shyny new xxx Bridge just after thermal paste seating and fitting the cooling block. Pre-fitted with WCG for an endurance test... run it a week to burn-test your system :D
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