Abstract
Due to growth of energy consumption by HPC servers and data centers many research efforts aim at addressing the problem of energy efficiency. Hence, the use of low power processors such as Intel Atom and ARM Cortex have recently gained more interest. In this article, we compare performance and energy efficiency of cutting-edge high-density HPC platform enclosures featuring either very high-performing processors (such as Intel Core i7 or E7) yet having low power-efficiency, or the reverse i.e. energy efficient processors (such as Intel Atom, AMD Fusion or ARM Cortex A9) yet with limited computing capacity. Our objective was to quantify in a very pragmatic way these general purpose CPUs using a set of reference benchmarks and applications run in an HPC environment, the trade-off that could exist between computing and power efficiency.
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Notes
- 1.
Top500 List of November 2012 – see http://top500.org
- 2.
For licensing reasons, it was not possible to use Intel compiler on PSCN’s platforms.
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Acknowledgments
The experiments presented in this paper were carried out using the HPC facility of the University of Luxembourg and Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center. The research presented in this paper was partially supported by a grant from Polish National Science Center (under award number 636/N-COST/09/2010/0), the FNR INTER-CNRS-11-03 Green@cloud project and the COST action IC0804.
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Jarus, M., Varrette, S., Oleksiak, A., Bouvry, P. (2013). Performance Evaluation and Energy Efficiency of High-Density HPC Platforms Based on Intel, AMD and ARM Processors. In: Pierson, JM., Da Costa, G., Dittmann, L. (eds) Energy Efficiency in Large Scale Distributed Systems. EE-LSDS 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8046. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40517-4_16
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