Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor High Performance Programming

James Jeffers · James Reinders

Feb 2013 · Newnes

About this ebook

Authors Jim Jeffers and James Reinders spent two years helping educate customers about the prototype and pre-production hardware before Intel introduced the first Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor. They have distilled their own experiences coupled with insights from many expert customers, Intel Field Engineers, Application Engineers and Technical Consulting Engineers, to create this authoritative first book on the essentials of programming for this new architecture and these new products.

This book is useful even before you ever touch a system with an Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor. To ensure that your applications run at maximum efficiency, the authors emphasize key techniques for programming any modern parallel computing system whether based on Intel Xeon processors, Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, or other high performance microprocessors. Applying these techniques will generally increase your program performance on any system, and better prepare you for Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors and the Intel MIC architecture.

• A practical guide to the essentials of the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor
• Presents best practices for portable, high-performance computing and a familiar and proven threaded, scalar-vector programming model
• Includes simple but informative code examples that explain the unique aspects of this new highly parallel and high performance computational product
• Covers wide vectors, many cores, many threads and high bandwidth cache/memory architecture

About the author

Jim Jeffers was the primary strategic planner and one of the first full-time employees on the program that became Intel ® MIC. He served as lead SW Engineering Manager on the program and formed and launched the SW development team. As the program evolved, he became the workloads (applications) and SW performance team manager. He has some of the deepest insight into the market, architecture and programming usages of the MIC product line. He has been a developer and development manager for embedded and high performance systems for close to 30 years.

James Reinders is a senior engineer who joined Intel Corporation in 1989 and has contributed to projects including the world’s first TeraFLOP supercomputer (ASCI Red), as well as compilers and architecture work for a number of Intel processors and parallel systems. James has been a driver behind the development of Intel as a major provider of software development products, and serves as their chief software evangelist. James has published numerous articles, contributed to several books and is widely interviewed on parallelism. James has managed software development groups, customer service and consulting teams, business development and marketing teams. James is sought after to keynote on parallel programming, and is the author/co-author of three books currently in print including Structured Parallel Programming, published by Morgan Kaufmann in 2012.