status of native MIC python?

[chrisvam]

Hi Brenton,

We're going to use the new KNL MIC boards at NERSC. We're new to MICs, but I had been naively hoping we could run a "native" python on each of the MIC cores, since our application is embarrassingly parallel. I could be wrong, but my impression is that the "Intel Distribution for Python" does not run natively on the MIC, instead automatically offloading some numpy/MKL operations, while your native approach could keep the calculation on the MIC, and avoid transferring data back-and-forth repeatedly in a longer python calculation. So two short questions:

• is the above naive picture correct?
• is your PyPhi still the best existing approach for running python natively on the MIC?

Thanks for any quick thoughts...

chris

[bpartridge]

Hi Chris,

Sorry for such a long delay replying! Always great to see interest from NERSC, but I'm afraid this project hasn't been maintained for a number of years. It was highly experimental, though you're welcome to use it at a starting point. What you describe - interpreting Python on each of the MIC cores - had been exactly the intent, but in the situations where performance was enough of an issue that we needed to use MIC systems, we found that a rewrite in lower-level code was usually warranted as well. I've since moved away from academia, and I'm no longer able to test on MIC systems. Still interested if anyone gets something like this running though!