NERSC-8 Architecture and Application Readiness Plans

In 2016, NERSC will be installing Cori (NERSC-8), a Cray XC system based around Intel's manycore Knights Landing processor. In this talk I will present details of the NERSC-8 machine (architecture, performance expectations) as well as the extensive application readiness efforts NERSC is undertaking in order to ensure our users are to be productive on this machine when it arrives. In particular, a substantial part of the cycles on NERSC systems are utilized for global and regional simulations of climate through community-based codes such as CESM, WRF, etc. As such, NERSC-8 will be a significant community resource for the optimization and re-factoring of climate and weather codes on emerging architectures. I will outline some of the current plans NERSC has for addressing the various computational and data analysis challenges facing these applications on the NERSC-8 architecture.