Performance Evaluation of Intel Broadwell Nodes Based Supercomputer Using Computational Fluid Dynamics and Climate Applications

We conducted a performance evaluation of a production supercomputer based on the Intel Xeon Processor E5-2680v4 (Broadwell), a fourteen-core die shrink of the Haswell architecture and compared and contrasted it with two earlier Xeons: the E5-2680v3 (Haswell), a twelve-core implementation of the fourth-generation Haswell architecture and the E5-2680v2 (Ivy Bridge), a ten-core die shrink of the third-generation Sandy Bridge architecture. The new features of Broadwell architecture are evaluated and compared with Ivy Bridge using several low-level benchmarks and five full-scale production quality scientific and engineering applications. A model to predict the performance of HPCG, Overflow and Cart3D is presented for two architectures. In addition, we evaluate the effects of degrading base core frequency to AVX frequency while using AVX2 instructions and of the Turbo Boost feature.

[1]  Marsha Berger,et al.  High Resolution Aerospace Applications Using the NASA Columbia Supercomputer , 2005, ACM/IEEE SC 2005 Conference (SC'05).

[2]  Song Huang,et al.  Measurement and characterization of Haswell power and energy consumption , 2015, E2SC '15.

[3]  Pawel Gepner,et al.  Evaluation of Intel Xeon E5-2600v2 based cluster for technical computing workloads , 2014, 2014 International Conference on High Performance Computing & Simulation (HPCS).

[4]  Thomas Ilsche,et al.  An Energy Efficiency Feature Survey of the Intel Haswell Processor , 2015, 2015 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshop.

[5]  D. Marr,et al.  Hyper-Threading Technology Architecture and MIcroarchitecture , 2002 .