Intel Xeon D 12 and 16 core parts launched: first benchmarks
I can&#x27;t stress how game-changing this is to anyone in super-computing. (The whole direction Intel&#x27;s been taking for the last ~5 years has been poised for this.) I went into a bit of detail here[1] (n.b. this was pre-Xeon D, the addition of which will only increase performance) for those who are curious.<p>Right now we&#x27;re living in a golden age of financially accessible super-computing. We don&#x27;t need to deal with MPI anymore, we just use RDMA and have Infiniband speed fetches to any machine joined to the cluster[see: MS Paper]. I was working on RELION as a favor to my father and got deeper and deeper into it because my docket was pretty open and it was fascinating. Long story short, I sketched up a test setup with Phi, RDMA (which admittedly wasn&#x27;t used that much, as the problem set would be characterized by anyone as &quot;embarrassingly parallel&quot;) and 10GBit. This is all commodity stuff, and we effectively <i>never touch disk</i> -- I cobbled together 18650&#x27;s in the rack[see: batt] instead of a UPS with a uC which fires off a &#x27;persist state to disk&#x27; message on any power interrupt but other than that it&#x27;s all RAM and blazing fast. (Side-note: anyone who read the <i>Nature Methods</i> special on all the Cryo-EM stuff may be seeing a paper or two with a few new sets of computational methodologies in the near future ;))<p>Buyer beware though -- sacrificing clock speed for more cores can end up costing you a lot more overall[2]. Licensing policies have a tendency to change around from version to version, so your perfectly licensed Oracle 11g (lets say it was quantified by the physical chip you throw into the socket) might not have a straight forward upgrade path (now by the number of vCPUs). A lot of clients of mine got burned trying to move from Iron to AWS, only to realize that Oracle licensed per _available CPU_. Fines galore. They ended up downgrading to a previous revision Xeon (i.e. 4th gen E5 MSRP $x,xxx instead of 5th gen E5 MSRP $0,xxx with better performance but more cores). Anyone encountering this problem should keep that trick up their sleeve and find some 1 year old off-lease equipment with less cores but a higher clock speed to keep license compliance and still meet your computational demands. Anyways, yeah the latest and greatest might not be the most economic of choices for this reason[licensing].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10805087" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10805087</a>
[2] This has so many variables as one can imagine - you can&#x27;t just go by what people did in 1975 i.e. &quot;this instruction takes x cycles, we can physically count how long our computation will take with a sheet of graph paper&quot; because of pre-fetching, pipelining, cache patterns, the use (or lack of use) of the AVX(2) registers, etc etc. 
[3]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;software.intel.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;articles&#x2F;intelr-xeon-phitm-coprocessor-february-developer-webinar-qa-responses" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;software.intel.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;articles&#x2F;intelr-xeon-phitm-...</a>
[MS Paper] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sigops.org&#x2F;sosp&#x2F;sosp15&#x2F;current&#x2F;2015-Monterey&#x2F;printable&#x2F;227-dragojevic.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sigops.org&#x2F;sosp&#x2F;sosp15&#x2F;current&#x2F;2015-Monterey&#x2F;printabl...</a>
[Batt] As you probably have guessed, I have no formal EE training. I did however rigorously read all of the safety datasheets, use very high quality Panasonics, and strictly conform to the CC-CV guidelines so my fathers lab would not catch on fire. This is probably not the best idea, but it&#x27;s electrically safe and isolated. It&#x27;d pass UL certification.... at least I think ;) [licensing] If you&#x27;re a corporate entity who is moving into any sort of cloud or onto new hardware, my firm has quite a bit of expertise in licensing compliance when either a) shifting to new hardware, or b) shifting to the cloud, as well as getting your best bang for buck with existing licenses.