Best Practices for Administering a Medium Sized Cluster with Intel® Xeon Phi™ Coprocessors

Abstract

This work describes the best practices for configuring and managing an Intel® Xeon Phi™ cluster. The Xeon Phi presents a unique environment to the user and preparing this environment requires unique procedures. This work will outline these procedures and provide examples for HPC Administrators to utilize and then customize for their system. Considerable effort has been put forth to help researchers determine how to maximize their performance on the Xeon Phi, but little has been done for the administrators of these systems. Now that the Xeon Phis are being deployed on larger systems, there is a need for information on how to manage and deploy these systems. The information provided here will serve as a supplement to the documentation Intel provides in order to bridge the gap between workstation and cluster deployments. This work is based on the authors experiences deploying and maintaining the Beacon cluster at the University of Tennessee's Application Acceleration Center of Excellence (AACE).