On the use of many-core Marvell ThunderX2 processor for HPC workloads
Marvell’s ThunderX2 has been the first Arm-based processor with deployments in large-scale HPC production systems, challenging the dominance that x86 processors had in the last decades. While x86 processors and its software stack have been characterized in detail, the behavior of Arm counterparts is...
| Autores: | , , , |
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| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2020 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) |
| Repositorio: | UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/329761 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://hdl.handle.net/2117/329761 https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11227-020-03397-6 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Compilers (Computer programs) High performance computing Arm ThunderX2 Skylake Power Arm HPC Compiler GCC Compiladors (Programes d'ordinador) Càlcul intensiu (Informàtica) Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Arquitectura de computadors |
| Sumario: | Marvell’s ThunderX2 has been the first Arm-based processor with deployments in large-scale HPC production systems, challenging the dominance that x86 processors had in the last decades. While x86 processors and its software stack have been characterized in detail, the behavior of Arm counterparts is not well known, limiting its adoption. This work methodically characterizes performance and power efficiency of the ThunderX2 running different HPC workloads compiled with two state-of-the-art compilers, GCC and Arm HPC Compiler. We study the maturity of available compilers and find that the Arm HPC Compiler is able to apply additional optimizations, resulting in better performance than GCC. In addition, we also compare both performance and power with respect to an Intel Skylake processor. Despite the faster single thread performance of Skylake, ThunderX2 is able to match performance on multi-threaded workloads due to its superior memory bandwidth. However, power efficiency of ThunderX2 is far from matching Skylake-based processors when AVX512 extensions are used. |
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