This past June at ISC 2013 the IBM booth featured live demonstration of IBM Platform HPC V3.2 managing an IBM iDataplex cluster equipped with Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors.

As part of the demonstration, the potential performance gains running an application on Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors was shown by running the visually stunning Intel Embree crown rendering on Intel Xeon and Intel Xeon Phi simultaneously.

IBM Platform HPC provides a unified web-based interface for deployment and managment of the cluster. Additionally, it includes application submission templates to allow administrators the flexiblity to create templates to greatly simplify the submission of jobs for their users. A number of templates for well known ISV and open source applications are also included as standard. For ISC, a template was created to allow Intel Embree to be easily launched through the built-in workload manager for execution on Intel Xeon or Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors.

Finally, when the processor intensive Intel Embree application was running, the monitoring and reporting capabilities of IBM Platform HPC provided both real time and historical reporting on the health of each node in the cluster, including metrics specific to the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor such as temperature, power consumption and utilization - all through a consistent web-based interface.

Enjoy the short video of the demo here.