NERSC has partnered with 20 representative application teams to evaluate performance on the Xeon-Phi Knights Landing architecture and develop an application-optimization strategy for the greater NERSC workload on the recently installed Cori system. In this article, we present early case studies and summarized results from a subset of the 20 applications highlighting the impact of important architecture differences between the Xeon-Phi and traditional Xeon processors. We summarize the status of the applications and describe the greater optimization strategy that has formed.