Altair utilizing Xeon Phi Coprocessors to "radically change the way organizations design products and make decisions.”

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Innovation Intelligence®
Altair on Intel® Xeon Phi™:
Optimizing HPC For
Breakthrough Performance
Eric Lequiniou
Director, High Performance Computing
ISC’13  Leipzig, Germany

2. “Our vision is to radically change
the way organizations design
products and make decisions.”
– James R. Scapa, Chairman & CEO, Altair

3. Copyright © 2013 Altair Engineering, Inc. Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved.
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Innovation Intelligence®
27+Years of Innovation
40+Offices in 19 Countries
1800+Employees Worldwide

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Altair Knows HPC
Altair is the only company that:
makes HPC tools…
develops HPC applications…
…and uses these to solve real HPC
problems
500 Altair engineers worldwide
use HPC every day for
real-world modeling
& simulation

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Intel and Altair: Partners in HPC
A history of collaboration…
• Cluster Management: PBS-Intel integrations
• MPI integration
• Intel Cluster Checker
• Certifications: Intel Cluster-Ready
• PBS Professional
• Solvers (RADIOSS, OptiStruct, AcuSolve)
• Application Integration: Use of Intel tools and technologies
• Intel® MPI, Intel® Fortran & C++ compilers, Intel® MKL Library, Intel®
VTune™ Amplifier, Intel trace analyzer & collector
• Benchmarking activities on large cluster configurations
• Professional Support: Close technical collaboration
• Access to Intel hardware resources: SDV systems, large cluster
• Intel technical expertise helps us to optimize our software on Intel
systems
ICR award-winning
partner: 2011 and 2012

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About RADIOSS
Compute-intensive simulation software for Manufacturing
• For 20+ years an established standard for automotive crash and impact
• Differentiated by its high scalability, quality and robustness
• Supports multiphysics simulation and advanced materials
• Used across all industries to improve safety and manufacturability
Companies use RADIOSS to simulate real-world scenarios (crash tests,
climate effects, etc.) to test the performance of a product

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Key RADIOSS Feature: Hybrid MPP Model
 Highly parallel code
• Multi-level parallelization
• Domain decomposition MPI parallelization
• Multithreading OpenMP
 Enhanced performance
• Best scalability in the marketplace
• High efficiency on large HPC clusters
• Unique, proven method for rich scalability over thousands of cores for FEA
• Flexibility -- easy tuning of MPI & OpenMP
• Robustness -- parallel arithmetic allows perfect repeatability in parallel

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About PBS Professional
• Market-leading job scheduler
• Policy-driven, tunable scheduling
• Dynamic OS provisioning
• GPU/co-processor scheduling (e.g. Xeon Phi)
• Only product with EAL3+ security certification
• Green Provisioning™ - Advanced Power Management
• Scalability to hundreds of thousands of cores
• Proven for 20+ years at thousands of sites
• Measurable performance and value
• Maximized utilization, throughput and time to results
• Other products cost more and deliver less
Schedule | Prioritize | Scale
“Without its flexibility, it
wouldn't have been able to
handle what we're doing.”
– NASA Ames
High-performance computing (HPC) resource and workload management

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The Future of HPC: Altair on Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessors
• PBS Professional on Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessor
• Currently supported out of the box
• Altair offers a configuration toolkit that automates the process of configuring PBS
Professional in a Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessor environment
• RADIOSS on Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessor
• We have successfully ported RADIOSS using 2 programming models, offload for Implicit
solver and native for Explicit solver
• We are focusing on the development and optimization of RADIOSS Explicit using native
programing model
• Big benefit in Intel® Xeon® processor programming continuity
• Easy development process with encouraging results
Altair is one of the first ISVs to support software
on Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessors

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PBS Professional: Xeon Phi™ Support
• PBS Professional matches workload to resources
• We configure PBS to consider the coprocessor
resource(s) during job scheduling
• PBS Professional records the usage of the Intel
Xeon Phi devices within the accounting logs
• E.g. how many Intel Xeon Phi devices and/or cores were
used
• Supports basic and advanced configurations
• Running single or multiple Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessor
jobs on a node
Technical white paper explains
how to manually configure PBS
Professional to support a basic or
advanced Xeon Phi configuration
A toolkit has also been created to
automatically configure PBS for
Xeon Phi
PBS Professional supports Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessor
out of the box

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Offload Mode: Xeon Phi is used “like a GPU”
 Good single card performance with RADIOSS implicit
 Up to 2.5x faster than 12-core Intel Westmere
 Best suited for Implicit (same constraints as GPU)
Native Mode: Xeon Phi is used as a standalone
computing resource
 Milestone: First time RADIOSS Explicit Solver ported to coprocessor or accelerator – never
ported to GPU due to complexity
 Easy porting process – no source code changes (only –mmic added to makefile)
 Consistency of Intel compiler & tools allows incremental effort to tune for Xeon Phi
 Optimizations relevant on all Xeon platforms
 Flexible execution options:
 Running natively on one card, enables more efficient computing (host free for more tasks)
 Also enables heterogeneous computing (using host and one or more cards)
 See results data on next slides…
Porting RADIOSS on Xeon Phi: Summary of Work
Intel interview at Altair Xeon Phi SC12 demo

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Live Demo: RADIOSS and PBS on Xeon Phi
• See RADIOSS running natively on Xeon Phi coprocessor
• PBS Professional schedules RADIOSS jobs to Xeon Phi coprocessor’s 50+ cores
• RADIOSS analyzes car crash simulation data on Xeon Phi -- help manufacturers identify design
issues to improve safety
• Resulting simulation is visualized in Altair HyperView (see below)
“Neon” 1-million
element frontal
crash simulation
benchmark –
viewed in
HyperView

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2365
1925
1507
1152
0
500
1000
1500
2000
2500
1 MIC card 1 MIC card+host 2 MIC cards+host
12 MPI
30 MPI x 6 OpenMP
12 MPI x 20 OpenMP +
12 MPI
2 x 6 MPI x 30 OpenMP
+ 6 MPI x 2 OpenMP
RADIOSS Performance on Intel® Xeon Phi™
 33% performance improvement compared to original native version
 Single Xeon Phi card now faster than 12 Westmere CPU cores
 Heterogeneous computing enables computation using Xeon Phi and Xeon host*
 Over 1.5x improvement for 1 Xeon Phi card + host
 Over 2x improvement for 2 Xeon Phi cards + host
 Optimization tuning helps across all Xeon platforms
* Speedups for heterogeneous computing are given using Westmere development platform,
Lower
is
better
Elapsed time
Host only

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Xeon Phi Development Advantages
 Simplified development
• No need to learn new language (like CUDA or OpenCL)
• Native porting not possible for GPU
 Can continue using preferred tools -- e.g.:
• Intel Fortran/C compiler for compilation and build
• Intel Vtune Amplifier and ITAC for tuning
 Performance improvements with reasonable effort
• Our developers are happy with performance gains relative to work required
• Optimizations can be used across all Xeon platforms
• Heterogeneous computing using MPI, both on host and Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessor,
further enhances global performance
 Responsive, helpful support team
• Intel helped Altair translate BLAS-like routines in terms of Xeon Phi offload
• Intel helped tune environment parameters to optimize performance
• Intel was there for us at every turn for support and advice

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Value: Optimizing HPC for Users
• By running Altair HPC applications on Xeon Phi, we are ensuring our
users can run the most compute-intensive portion of their work on the
most cutting-edge, high-performance architecture available
• Improved performance and quality
• Get results faster
• Improve precision of results
• Be prepared to scale
• Improve ability to innovate
• Improved competitive advantage
• Reduce wait time for results – get to market faster

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For More Information
• PBS Professional now supports Xeon Phi
• http://www.pbsworks.com/Product.aspx?id=27
• RADIOSS availability:
• Xeon Phi Beta available in Q3 2013
• Beta will focus on RADIOSS v13.0
• Visit us online:
• www.altair.com
• www.hyperworks.com
• www.pbsworks.com