Windows 10 with Xeon Phi

Can you use an Intel Xeon Phi with Windows 10? Yes, you can. However, just because you can do something, doesn’t mean that you should do it! I did a set up and a little testing mainly just to see if it would work — it does!

Molecular Dynamics Performance on GPU Workstations — NAMD

Molecular Dynamics programs can achieve very good performance on modern GPU accelerated workstations giving job performance that was only achievable using CPU compute clusters only a few years ago. The group at UIUC working on NAMD were early pioneers of using GPU’s for compute acceleration and NAMD has very good performance acceleration using NVIDIA CUDA. We show you how good that performance is on modern Nvidia GPU’s

5 Ways of Parallel Programming

Modern computing hardware is all about parallelism. This is because we essentially hit the wall several years ago on increasing core clock frequency to speedup serial code execution. The transistor count has continued to follow Moore’s Law (doubling every 1.5-2 years) but these transistors have mostly gone into multiple cores, vector units, memory controllers, etc. on a single die. To utilize this hardware, software needs to be written to take advantage of it, i.e. you have to go parallel.

GTC 2015 Deep Learning and OpenPOWER

Another great GTC meeting. NVIDIA does this right! The most interesting aspects for me this year were the talks on “Deep Learning” (Artificial Neural Networks) and OpenPOWER. I have some observations and links to recordings of the keynotes and talks. Enjoy!

NVIDIA CUDA GPU computing on a (modern) laptop

Modern high-end laptops can be treated as desktop system replacements so it’s expected that people will want to try to do some serious computing on them. Doing GPU accelerated computing on a laptop is possible and performance can be surprisingly good with a high-end NVIDIA GPU. [I’m looking at GTX 980m and 970m ]. However, first you have to get it to work! Optimus technology can present serious problems to someone who wants to run a Linux based CUDA laptop computing platform. Read on to see what worked.