The complexity of modern and upcoming computing architectures poses severe challenges for code developers and application specialists, and forces them to expose the highest possible degree of parallelism, in order to make the best use of the available hardware. The Intel$^{(R)}$ Xeon Phi$^{(TM)}$ of second generation (code-named Knights Landing, henceforth KNL) is the latest many-core system, which implements several interesting hardware features like for example a large number of cores per node (up to 72), the 512 bits-wide vector registers and the high-bandwidth memory. The unique features of KNL make this platform a powerful testbed for modern HPC applications. The performance of codes on KNL is therefore a useful proxy of their readiness for future architectures. In this work we describe the lessons learnt during the optimisation of the widely used codes for computational astrophysics P-Gadget-3, Flash and Echo. Moreover, we present results for the visualisation and analysis tools VisIt and yt. These examples show that modern architectures benefit from code optimisation at different levels, even more than traditional multi-core systems. However, the level of modernisation of typical community codes still needs improvements, for them to fully utilise resources of novel architectures.

中文翻译：

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在通往 Exascale 的道路上磨练和校对天体物理学代码。多核系统代码现代化的经验

现代和即将到来的计算架构的复杂性给代码开发人员和应用程序专家带来了严峻的挑战，并迫使他们暴露出尽可能高的并行度，以便最好地利用可用的硬件。Intel$^{(R)}$ Xeon Phi$^{(TM)}$ 第二代（代号为 Knights Landing，以下称为 KNL）是最新的众核系统，它实现了几个有趣的硬件功能，例如每个节点有大量内核（最多 72 个）、512 位宽的矢量寄存器和高带宽内存。KNL 的独特功能使该平台成为现代 HPC 应用程序的强大测试平台。因此，KNL 上代码的性能是它们为未来架构做好准备的有用代表。在这项工作中，我们描述了在优化广泛使用的计算天体物理学 P-Gadget-3、Flash 和 Echo 代码过程中学到的经验教训。此外，我们还展示了可视化和分析工具 VisIt 和 yt 的结果。这些示例表明，现代架构从不同级别的代码优化中受益，甚至比传统的多核系统还多。然而，典型社区代码的现代化水平仍需提高，以充分利用新型架构的资源。