Paper Info
Title
An empirical survey of performance and energy efficiency variation on Intel processors
Abstract
Traditional HPC performance and energy characterization approaches assume homogeneity and predictability in the performance of the target processor platform. Consequently, processor performance variation has been considered to be a secondary issue in the broader problem of performance characterization. In this work, we present an empirical survey of the variation in processor performance and energy efficiency on several generations of HPC-grade Intel processors. Our study shows that, compared to the previous generation of Intel processors, the problem of performance variation has become worse on more recent generation of Intel processors. Specifically, the performance variation across processors on a large-scale production HPC cluster at LLNL has increased to 20% and the run-to-run variation in the performance of individual processors has increased to 15%. We show that this variation is further magnified under a hardware-enforced power constraint, potentially due to the increase in number of cores, inconsistencies in the chip manufacturing process and their combined impact on processor's energy management functionality. Our experimentation with a hardware-enforced processor power constraint shows that the variation in processor performance and energy efficiency has increased by up to 4x on the latest Intel processors.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1145/3149412.3149421
E2SC@SC
Field
DocType
ISBN
Energy management,Predictability,Energy characterization,Computer science,Efficient energy use,Parallel computing,Chip,Real-time computing,Empirical survey,Empirical research,Manufacturing process
Conference
978-1-4503-5132-4
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
4
0.47
13
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Aniruddha Marathe11138.11
Yijia Zhang211314.67
Grayson Blanks340.47
Nirmal Kumbhare492.55
Ghaleb Abdulla5519150.23
Barry Rountree6101351.24