Intel KNL to advance Number Theory

Members of the mathematics, research, and development community at http://www.mersenneforum.org are working to purchase an Intel Xeon Phi -Knights Landing shared development machine. 

We have several projects in Number Theory research incuding mlucas, prime95 (http://www.mersenne.org) and others that can be significantly advanced by developing for upcoming High Performance Computing technology. Intel's Xeon Phi processors offer these volunteer developers early access to several key features, including 6 channel DDR4 bandwidth, HBM on-die, large shared caches,  AVX-512 instructions, and 64 cores with 256 threads.

We strongly believe that future consumer and enterprise processors will continue to move towards similar architectures. Allowing benchmarking, research, and development to occur today will ensure we can continue to see the ever improving performance of CPUs reflected in the work output of these projects. 

More information on this project and a wealth of other on-going efforts can be found at the mersenneforum.org thread here:
http://www.mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=20152

Logistics of colocation and power for this system have already been committed to by members of the community, but we need your help to purchase the system and push this work forward. Ideally we will  be able to achieve our funding goals and proceed with this purchase by the end of September so that we can begin work as soon as possible.

This system will also remain fully powered and online to provide contributions to mersenne.org when not being actively used for development, so you can be assured that the hardware will be fully utilized for its entire lifetime.

We are immensely thankful for any and all donations towards this project. We also welcome any requests for shared access to this system from other researchers and developers within the community.

If we are able to exceed our goal we may be able to purchase more than one development system.