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Does anyone know where I could check the HP Proliant DL 380 Gen 6 and 380p Gen8 compatibility with Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessors? At first sight it seems they fit the PCI Riser. Would services like nginx, mysql and clickhouse benefit from Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor? I run latest Ubuntu.

Thanks!

svet0slav
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Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessors actually are single-board-computer, so I think they are compatible with anything providing PCI-E and adequate power/cooling. They run an embedded Linux distro, SSHable from the host.

That said, they will not do anything for apache/nginx/etc. They are almost "pure computing" device, providing dual massive FMAC/vector pipelines only useful for HPC. Their general-purpose cores are Atom-based, with performance much lower than traditional CPUs. Moreover they are EOL and unsupported by now.

So don't bother with them.

shodanshok
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You want to search Intel Ark for your specific model, and see what the install process and explicit requirements look like.

For example, the most recent (2017) models have a software distribution that supports Ubuntu 17.10, Centos/RHEL 7.x and SLES 12.x - but they also require BIOS "large BAR" support, which older servers may not have:

Enable Large Base Address Registers (BAR) Support in the Platform BIOS In order for Intel(R) Xeon Phi(TM) coprocessors to function properly in a platform, BIOS and OS support for large (8GB+) Memory Mapped I/O Base Address Registers (MMIO BAR's) above the 4GB address limit must be enabled. By default, most platform BIOS implementations have this set to disabled, therefore it must be enabled manually in the platform BIOS setup.

This blog explains in detail what to look for in the BIOS. Decoding of 64b PCI resource addresses comes under many names, in my system it is listed as "Above 4G decoding" in the PCI configuration menu.

0xF2
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