Evaluating and Optimizing the NERSC Workload on Knights Landing

>Taylor Barnes, Brandon Cook, Jack Deslippe, Douglas Doerfler, Brian Friesen, Yun (Helen) He, Thorsten Kurth, Tuomas Koskela, Mathieu Lobet, Tareq Malas, Leonid Oliker, Andrey Ovsyannikov, Abhinav Sarje, Jean-Luc Vay, Henri Vincenti, Samuel Williams, Pierre Carrier, Nathan Wichmann, Marcus Wagner, Paul Kent, Christopher Kerr, John Dennis

NERSC has partnered with 20 representative application teams to evaluate performance on the Xeon-Phi Knights Landing architecture and develop an application-optimization strategy for the greater NERSC workload on the recently installed Cori system. In this article, we present early case studies and summarized results from a subset of the 20 applications highlighting the impact of important architecture differences between the Xeon-Phi and traditional Xeon processors. We summarize the status of the applications and describe the greater optimization strategy that has formed.