[gmx-users] intel GPU acceleration?

[Szilárd Páll]

On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 10:35 PM, Tamas Horvath <hotafin at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's actually more like a cluster on a card than a gpu. It has x86 cores
> (albeit very simple ones). Theoretically any x86 code compiled with the
> xeon phi compiler can run on it without any further modification, though
> further optimizations are possible.

FTFY ;)
"..., though further optimizations are necessary."

Simply compiling C or Fortran for MIC and running in symmetric mode (=
filling the MIC with MPI ranks) is something that will surely not lead
to good performance. The idea of "just cross-compile and run" is
something that nobody but the Intel marketing department would
suggests - even their engineers state that without fine-grain
multi-level parallelization (SIMD + multi-threading and/or MPI) you
will never get good performance.

GROMACS will have the SIMD parallelization layer, the vectorized
kernels are in the 5.0 development branch. However, the code that
allows Phi cards to be used efficiently (as accelerators) may not make
it into 5.0. Without this unfortunately most simulations (except
perhaps reaction-field runs) will probably not benefit from using a
Phi. Why? Just imagine PME with small 3D FFT-s running on a processor
with 60 cores / 240 threads supported and communicating through PCI-E
+ network. Won't work very well, I promise!

>
>
> On 3 February 2014 21:56, Albert <mailmd2011 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hello：
>>
>> I noticed that Intel also have GPU such as: Intel(R) Xeon Phi(tm)
>> coprocessor
>> 3120A. I am just wondering is the latest version of Gromacs support such
>> kind of GPU calculation?
>>
>> thank you very much.
>>
>> Albert
>> --
>> Gromacs Users mailing list
>>
>> * Please search the archive at
>> http://www.gromacs.org/Support/Mailing_Lists/GMX-Users_List before
>> posting!
>>
>> * Can't post? Read http://www.gromacs.org/Support/Mailing_Lists
>>
>> * For (un)subscribe requests visit
>> https://maillist.sys.kth.se/mailman/listinfo/gromacs.org_gmx-users or
>> send a mail to gmx-users-request at gromacs.org.
>>
> --
> Gromacs Users mailing list
>
> * Please search the archive at http://www.gromacs.org/Support/Mailing_Lists/GMX-Users_List before posting!
>
> * Can't post? Read http://www.gromacs.org/Support/Mailing_Lists
>
> * For (un)subscribe requests visit
> https://maillist.sys.kth.se/mailman/listinfo/gromacs.org_gmx-users or send a mail to gmx-users-request at gromacs.org.