Computing on Knights and Kepler Architectures

A recent trend in scientific computing is the increasingly important role of co-processors, originally built to accelerate graphics rendering, and now used for general high-performance computing. The INFN Computing On Knights and Kepler Architectures (COKA) project focuses on assessing the suitability of co-processor boards for scientific computing in a wide range of physics applications, and on studying the best programming methodologies for these systems. Here we present in a comparative way our results in porting a Lattice Boltzmann code on two state-of-the-art accelerators: the NVIDIA K20X, and the Intel Xeon-Phi. We describe our implementations, analyze results and compare with a baseline architecture adopting Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs