Accelerating with 512-bit SIMD : A case study for molecular dynamics simulation on Intel´s Knights Corner

Author

Yi Zheng ; Juan Chen ; Qiang Wu ; Tao Tang

Author_Institution

Sch. of Comput. Sci., Nat. Univ. of Defense Technol., Changsha, China

fYear

2013

fDate

19-21 June 2013

Firstpage

195

Lastpage

200

Abstract

Multi/many-core design combined with wide vector extension has become the mainstream of modern process architectures. Recently, Intel released Knights Corner, a many-core processor of Intel´s Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecuture. Knights Corner comprises up to 62 cores, each supports 512-bit SIMD operation, that is, 8-way double precision floating-point vector operation. In this paper, to analyze the practical effect of the 512-bit SIMD extension, we port a molecular dynamics application onto the Knights Corner using SIMD intrinsics and then adopt optimizations such as loop unrolling and data prefetching. The experimental results demonstrate that our 512-bit SIMD implementation can achieve nearly ideal SIMD speedups (up to 7.69) over the non-SIMD version for the force computation task.

Keywords

integrated circuit design; microprocessor chips; parallel processing; 8-way double precision floating-point vector; Intel; Knights Corner; SIMD; data prefetching; loop unrolling; many integrated core architecuture; many-core processor; molecular dynamics simulation; multi/many-core design; wide vector extension; word length 512 bit; Computational modeling; Computer architecture; Force; Microwave integrated circuits; Optimization; Prefetching; Vectors; 512-bit SIMD; Knights Corner; MIC; molecular dynamics simulation;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Communications and Information Technology (ICCIT), 2013 Third International Conference on

Conference_Location

Beirut

Print_ISBN

978-1-4673-5306-9

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICCITechnology.2013.6579548

Filename

6579548