Performance and Energy Usage of Workloads on KNL and Haswell Architectures
Event Type
Workshop

Accelerators
Benchmarks
Compiler Analysis and Optimization
Deep Learning
Effective Application of HPC
Energy
Exascale
GPU
I/O
Parallel Application Frameworks
Parallel Programming Languages, Libraries, Models and Notations
Performance
Simulation
Storage
TimeMonday, November 13th11:50am - 12:10pm
Location704-706
DescriptionManycore architectures are an energy-efficient step towards exascale computing within a constrained power budget. The Intel Knights Landing (KNL) manycore chip is a specific example of this and has seen early adoption by a number of HPC facilities. It is therefore important to understand the performance and energy usage characteristics of KNL. In this paper, we evaluate the performance and energy efficiency of KNL in contrast to the Xeon (Haswell) architecture for applications representative of the workload of users at NERSC. We consider the optimal MPI/OpenMP configuration of each application and use the results to characterize KNL in contrast to Haswell. As well as traditional DDR memory, KNL contains MCDRAM and we also evaluate its efficacy. Our results show that, averaged over our benchmarks, KNL is 1.84x more energy efficient than Haswell and has 1.27x greater performance.