1. Unconventional applications of Intel® Xeon Phi™ Processor (KNL)
Antonio Cisternino

2. Intel® Xeon Phi™ Processor Knights Landing (KNL)
Differently from its predecessor (Knights Corner) KNL features full x86 support and it’s bootable
Each core has 2 FPUs 512b wide for vectorization
Core is derived from silvermont though significantly changed
Modes support different workloads though using MCDRAM as cache is usually preferred

3. How the non FPU part works?
We tested software stacks as far as possible from the typical HPC stack
We used the following software stack:
Linux
Mono (open source .NET implementation)
F# (using fsharpi the language REPL)
Visual Studio Code + Ionide
Firefox
The platform allows to stress CPU (JIT and code) and memory (Garbage collection)

4. Visual Studio Code running on KNL accessed using X-Windows (Data science using FSLab)

5. (easier) Parallel programming
Parallel task library
52x
Sequential
Parallel

6. A platform for microservices?
Use of Suave F# web server to create a process exposing a simple function through HTTP
Use of http_load tool for stress testing a number of URLs with different degree of parallelism
Tested a large number (up to 128) web servers running on Dell C6320p with Intel® Xeon Phi™ Processor 7210 and on a Dell R730 with two Xeon E2680-v4 CPUs
Measured:
Latency of connection and data reception
Number of fetches over 10 seconds made by a number of concurrent threads to all the servers
We tried 256 Web servers though Xeon failed to properly start all the instances whilst KNL managed to start all of them

7. The (trivial) web server

8. 64 web servers accessed by 64 threads
XeonPHI
Xeon E2680-v4 (2x)

9. 64 Web servers accessed by 8 threads
XeonPHI
Xeon E2680-v4 (2x)

10. Comparisons of KNL vs Xeon
64/64
8/64
128/128
8/128

11. Conclusions
A single Intel® Xeon Phi™ Processor core is less powerful (around 5-6x of a Xeon one)
I/O bound workloads may nevertheless benefit from massively parallel architecture (including MCDRAM benefits)
Mixed workload are possible allowing for vector- aware code to be coordinated by more traditional languages
Productivity benefits from mature software stacks
Intel® Xeon Phi™ Processor looks viable as a platform for microservices specially for the advantages of reduced power consumption