I can answer a few of these.

3) When the /soft/scheduling/knl/knl.txt​ text says knl00 node status: in use by William Scullin until 11:30 am CT 4 May 2016 - e-mail to to preempt running benchmark​. Can I still use the system or is there a policy defined ? How can I "reserve" the KNL ? Should I send an email to the mailing list ? With the time difference between the US and Chicago I could use it every night in Chicago :-)

You look in the /soft/scheduling/knl/knl.txt​ file and if it says "free", you update it to put your name in and time period your using it. It would be nice if you put the time in CT but the node's time is set to UTC so that would work as well.

5) Can you point me to someone who has lots of experience with VTune on KNL ?

As far as I can tell, no such person exists. Part of the issue is the Intel tools do not fully support (or support at all) KNL yet. If you want to try vtune, you should use intel compiler version 16 with the latest update. If you want the best KNL support you should use intel beta 17 compilers, but 17 doesn't have KNL vtune support.

7) Is memkind/autoHBM installed on the system (http://www.nersc.gov/users/computational-systems/cori/application-porting-an...) <http://www.nersc.gov/users/computational-systems/cori/application-porting-and-performance/using-high-performance-libraries-and-tools/>? Any recommendation regarding using or not using them ?

Yes hbw_malloc.h and memkind are installed. kevin