Evaluation of the Suitability of Intel Xeon Phi Clusters for the Simulation of Ultrasound Wave Propagation Using Pseudospectral Methods

Abstract

The ability to perform large-scale ultrasound simulations using Fourier pseudospectral methods has generated significant interest in medical ultrasonics, including for treatment planning in therapeutic ultrasound and image reconstruction in photoacoustic tomography. However, the routine execution of such simulations is computationally very challenging. Nowadays, the trend in parallel computing is towards the use of accelerated clusters where computationally intensive parts are offloaded from processors to accelerators. During last five years, Intel has released two generations of Xeon Phi accelerators. The goal of this paper is to investigate the performance on both architectures with respect to current processors, and evaluate the suitability of accelerated clusters for the distributed simulation of ultrasound propagation using Fourier-based methods. The paper reveals that the former version of Xeon Phis, the Knight’s Corner architecture, suffers from several flaws that reduce the performance far below the Haswell processors. On the other hand, the second generation called Knight’s Landing shows very promising performance comparable with current processors.