Can you add a Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor to a Dell PowerEdge 2950

Capt Swirly · February 6

I have recently gained possession of a Dell PowerEdge 2950 Server and was wondering if you could use a Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor with one. I would have to put it in a PCI-e x8 slot but that would be fine.
Thank you.

AbydosOne · February 6

1 minute ago, Capt Swirly said:

and was wondering if you could use a Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor with one

...to do what?

Xeon Phi aren't just add-on CPU cores; just want to make sure you're aware of that.

Capt Swirly · February 6

To run some processes on such as a Minecraft server or a Pi calculation

Zando_ · February 6

You would have to hunt down a manual or other official documentation that says yes. Boards can support the features needed to run a Phi coprocessor and still just... not work. My X299 Dark supports everything needed, but putting in my 5110P just throws some error about PCIe resources and refuses to boot.

2 minutes ago, AbydosOne said:

...to do what?

To fuck with I assume, same reason I have mine. It was like $50 or something for a 60c/240t SOC-thing with 8GB GDDR5, interesting piece of kit for pretty cheap.

mr cheese · February 6

13 minutes ago, Capt Swirly said:

To run some processes on such as a Minecraft server

My friend, I believe you had a thread from January 19th asking about this, I don't believe you can do that on a Xeon Phi.

EDIT: Apparently the Phi shows up as a NIC you can SSH into, running cut down RHEL on a sort-of-x86 instruction set that requires a custom gcc Intel provide(d). This means theoretically you can compile Java on one... but I'd warn that minecraft servers are mostly single-core and this is far from a well-performing single core card. You could try Airplane or Purpur as I know those use multiple cores to split chunk loading and rendering, massively increasing performance over vanilla/spigot, but even if you get it working I doubt it can manage to use that many cores.

12 minutes ago, Zando_ said:

putting in my 5110P just throws some error about PCIe resources and refuses to boot.

This appears to be a common problem, I doubt you'll know until you try unless you happen to get lucky and stumble across a random person with your same setup