Over at the Phi Musings blog, Dr. Stuart Midgley from Downunder Geosolutions has been documenting the process of getting Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors working in a cluster.
If you want to run native binaries on the Phi, their are a number of serious issues.
- launching your binary
- bandwidth to your application
- authentication onto the phi
to list a few. Intel provides a way to launch native applications called micnativeloadex which is almost what you want. It copies the phi application to the phi, along with the necessary shared libraries, launches it and maps back stdout and stderr to the host. It does NOT map stdin from the host to the application… which was a show stopper for us. We use unix pipes a LOT and must be able to feed data in via stdin.
While Midgley is early on in his journey to coprocessor harmony, I think it will be fun to follow along as he goes. Read the Full Story.
